Apple's macOS Sierra Holds Its Ground Against Microsoft's Windows 10

With all the attention focused on innovations in mobile and IoT, it’s easy to forget that a majority of work still gets completed on a computer. Yet, Apple’s WWDC developer conference showcased a mixture of innovations that cut across the PC and mobile domains. To recap, several of the major macOS Sierra updates included:

• Improvements to Continuity.  The goal behind Continuity, like Microsoft ’s Continuum and Universal Apps, is to have devices sense one another and move information seamlessly across devices. At WWDC Apple announced an auto unlock in the Sierra operating system. For example, an Apple watch securely authenticated to the wrist can verify your identity and tell the Mac to unlock desktop access without requiring a password. The company also announced a feature called universal clipboard that allows a rich copy and paste function from iPhone or iPad to the Mac. The paste functionality preserves the images, video, and even features not native to the Mac such as drawings made with the Apple pencil.
• OSX becomes macOS. As predicted, Apple changed the name of the computing operating system.
• iCloud drive. The company automated the process for saving documents to the cloud. iCloud drive will help you optimize storage by keeping older files in the cloud. This could extend the life of Macs that may lack storage for large file sizes such as HD videos. It will also make your documents and desktop accessible across other macs and other iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad.
• Tabs. It added Tabs to help users neatly organized and it’s bringing tabs to maps, and third party apps without any required application modifications. 
• Picture in picture. Yes, you can watch a movie, read your email and surf all at the same time.
• Siri on the Mac. As predicted, Siri finally works on the Mac. It can handle sophisticated queries for files, such as show me last week offsite files and can refine the query with follow on questions such as “just the files Ken sent me that are labeled as a draft.” You can also pin these queries to the notifications center. As you’d expect, the user can open files, request certain music, search the web and drop search results from Siri into documents. This reminded me of Microsoft’s Cortana.  This was a gap for Apple that I’m glad to see filled. I’d say Siri has come a long way but Apple and Microsoft are neck in neck for innovation in the natural language processing (NLP) arena. Lest we forget Google is a big player in the NLP space as the company indexes so many search queries. 
• ApplePay in Safari – Merchants have agreed to accept Apple pay on the web. The purchaser can securely authenticate payment to a merchant in Safari using an iPhone with touchID or tap of the watch. It’s a win for consumers and online merchants. I think this makes more sense than Apple Pay at the store. It makes the payment process faster and more secure. Instead of storing credit cards you can just use Apple Pay. 

In my mind, those were the critical announcements associated with macOS. But what does this mean for the industry? In many ways, the Sierra announcements are playing catch up to Windows 10 features. For example, the auto-unlock feature was widely touted as a huge usability win for Windows 10.  It needed to be part of the macOS. 

However, in true Apple fashion, Sierra’s features are implemented in a way that appears more meaningful and highlights how the various device platforms can reinforce each other (e.g. universal clipboard and Touch ID on an iPhone can be used to secure a purchase on the Mac.) The company is also opening up more of its software stack to developers which can only be a good thing for Apple and the industry at large.

Universal clipboard is a big deal. Years ago I predicted that the future of computing was service portability. I believed companies would build systems where data would move seamlessly across devices and applications, enabling you to start a process on one device and picking it up on another. Universal clipboard is one example of a manifestation of that vision. Only it’s better than I had imagined because it adds new futures, such as annotations.  

Increasingly, Apple is moving to the cloud. It offers new music subscriptions and a range of file storage. iCloud has had numerous challenges, but the latest iCloud drive announcements focus on making this service more intuitive by automatically storing items. Auto storage isn’t a new concept by any means. However automatic archiving of files to the cloud based on context such as time and utitization is an enhancement that most would enjoy. What’s unclear is how this would impact a customer’s iCloud storage purchases. Do they need to purchase more? Does it flexibly scale up and down like enterprise cloud storage or must the consumer be more directed in their purchase. 

One thing that was absent was touch on the Mac. I know Apple draws a hard line between the PC and iPads with touch but PC manufacturers, such as Dell and Lenovo , are providing compelling touch experience with Windows today. I believe this is an artificial distinction that Apple will eventually throw aside. Until that time, Apple maintains four separate operating systems that include watchOS, tvOS, macOS and iOS. Meanwhile its computing brethren Microsoft has focused on consolidating the operating systems.

From the standpoint of the consumer developer, there is a cleanness of separating the functionalities of the programs. From the standpoint of the enterprise developer, they’d rather have one operating system to use to build one holistic set of apps that might render differently across various device types. In this way, Microsoft has the preferred enterprise approach. However the vision of one simple operating system could only be achieved in an all Microsoft world which isn’t easy to happen. Will Apple embrace a more universal apps concept? Apparently not for the next year. Yet, I see a longer term potential for unification as more of each of the individual operating systems is rebuilt using the Swift programming language. 

What I find interesting in Apple’s latest announcements is the constant blurring of the categories between mobile, PCs and cloud computing. The goal is to allow seamless access to your data across devices without caring where its stored and without worrying if it’s a PC or a phone. Updates to Continuity allow you to deliver what I call a right-time experience - the right info, to the right device or devices, at the time of your choice. The latest operating system also focused on providing confidence based security that uses the proximity and functions of multiple devices to confirm identity. In today’s risky online world, anything we can do to streamline security is welcome. It’s unclear how all excited enterprise customers will be with iCloud drive or Siri on the Mac, but continuity and Siri features do benefit app developers in both camps.  In truth, I wasn’t expecting much from the macOS team, but I was wrong. Not only was there still life in the computing OS, it’s a thriving ecosystem.