macOS 10.12 Developer Preview Seed 1 Release Notes

Introduction

macOS 10.12 Developer Preview Seed 1 is pre-release software. Do not use this pre-release software in a commercial operating environment or with important data. You should back up all of your data before installing this software and regularly back up data while using the software.

Recovery cannot be used to re-install macOS 10.12 Developer Preview Seed 1. If an installation of macOS 10.12 Developer Preview Seed 1 fails, you may recover from an earlier backup, or via Recovery Disk Assistant System. More information about creating a Recovery Disk Assistant System is available here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202294

Developer Preview System Requirements

The macOS 10.12 Developer Preview supports the following Macs:

• MacBook, iMac: Late 2009 or newer

• MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, Mac Pro: 2010 or newer

Functionality not in macOS 10.12 Beta 1

• Faces in the Photos app do not sync across your devices.

• The ability for your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac is not in this seed.

Notes and Known Issues

About This Mac

• In the Storage Management window, QuickLook may bring up an empty preview.

• Size information for the System and iTunes categories in the sidebar of Storage Management window may be incorrect or show the progress indicator indefinitely.

• Sometimes the numbers in About This Mac storage meter add up to be greater than the volume size.

Aperture

• On systems with AMD graphics, when using the clone stamp Aperture quits unexpectedly.

• On systems with AMD graphics, the system print dialog appears as a black box.

• Slo-mo videos play at normal speed.

• Importing Live Photos into iPhoto and Aperture will cause the loss of the video portion of Live Photos.

Apple File System (APFS)

• You can use the command-line tool ‘diskutil’ in macOS 10.12 to create an Apple File System (APFS) container on an external hard drive, partition or disk image. APFS volumes in macOS 10.12 are case sensitive, cannot be shared over the network via AFP, do not support Time Machine backups, and cannot be used in conjunction with a Fusion Drive or as a startup volume.

Apple Pay

• Starting an Apple Pay for Web session on Mac will result in an empty payment sheet being presented if iPhone doesn’t have a payment card provisioned. Workaround: Provision payment card on iPhone before initiating payment on Mac.

App Store

• App updates and re-download of apps may not work. Workaround: Sign out and sign back in to App Store.

Contacts

• Non-Apple applications will not be able to access AddressBook or Contacts data sourced from server based accounts. To workaround this issue, sign out of iCloud, and copy desired contacts into the On My Mac group.

Fonts

• Some document fonts will not download automatically for Simplified and Traditional Chinese users. Workaround: Download the fonts with FontBook.

FileSync

• Support for portable home directories has been removed. Mobile home directories (network accounts which are cached locally) can still be created, but their home folder will no longer sync with their network home directory.

Find My Mac

• Users are unable to play a sound or locate their Mac after remotely locking or wiping it via Find My iPhone app or on iCloud.com. The Mac will show as “Offline” in both Find My iPhone app and iCloud.com.

Finder

• Users sharing their home directory between macOS 10.12 and OS X 10.11 may get an exception in the OS X 10.11 Finder when opening a window in List view, because their ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist has had unexpected data written to it by the macOS 10.12 Finder. Workaround: Launch Terminal (using Spotlight from the menu bar if necessary), and then: defaults delete com.apple.finder StandardViewSettings

iPhoto

• Importing Live Photos into iPhoto and Aperture will cause the loss of the video portion of Live Photos.

• Slo-mo videos play at normal speed.

Installer

• Systems may hang at the login screen after updating.

Workaround: Hold down the power button for 5 seconds, until your Mac turns off. Use the power button to turn on your Mac.

• Users running OS X 10.7 with FileVault are unable to install macOS 10.12.

Workaround: Turn off FileVault before installation.

• In some cases upgrades from OS X 10.7 to macOS 10.12 do not complete.

Workaround: Run installation a second time.

Keyboard Preferences

• Text replacements may disappear.

Localization

• Some text may not be localized to the selected system language.

• Some languages may have clipped or misaligned layout.

Mail

• Files attached to a blank email from 3rd-party applications may not be attached. Workaround: Save file then attach to message manually.

Messages

• Can’t enable/disable accounts from Messages preferences. Workaround: Toggle the account from Internet Accounts.

Notes

• Deleted folders may reappear after 30 minutes.

Photos

• Items in the Last import album, and user generated albums, are not removed following use of the delete command (command + delete as well).

Workaround: Going to another album view and coming back resolves the draw issue.

• People are not displayed in the People Album until the app is restarted.

Workaround: If face images are missing from the People Album, navigate to another album and back to see if the faces appear. Should this not resolve, quit the application and relaunch.

• Faces: A person can lose their name when quitting shortly after naming a person.

Workaround: Wait a few minutes before quitting after naming a person.

• Video portion of Live Photo not saved when imported from shared album. Albums and Shared Sidebar sections are not expanded in new Library.

Workaround: Click on the section header to expand it.

• Upgrading Photos 1.1 library with named faces shows the People album text ‘No People Found Yet’.

• Live Photo does not playback after turning on Live Photo.

• People will not sync across all your devices via iCloud Photo Library. It will be enabled in an upcoming seed.

• Search results for people are incorrect.

• Faces and Scenes are not processed.

Workaround: Leave Photos open and disable Energy Saver to allow initial processing to complete.

Safari

• Safari Technology Preview does not yet work on macOS 10.12. Please test website and Safari Extension compatibility using Safari included with macOS 10.12.

• The Web Content process may exit unexpectedly if shipping method is set to None and Shipping Address is required.

Security Preference Pane

• The “Open Anyway” button does not work.

Workaround: Users can Control + Click on an application and choose “Open” as a workaround.

Siri

• Using Siri to search for Photos taken in a specific location has limited support in the first Developer Seed.

• Users who select South African English in the first Developer Seed will see the Siri Language setting change back to British English.

• The File Search and System features for Siri on the Mac will not be supported in the first Developer Seed for Arabic, Hebrew, Finnish, and Malaysian.

• Bluetooth audio input methods (such as Bluetooth headsets) will not be supported for Siri in the first Developer Seed.

• Users will be unable to set location-based reminders using Siri in the first Developer Seed.

• Users will not be able to use Siri to play Podcasts in the first Developer Seed, although they can use Siri to perform an iTunes Store Search for Podcasts.

• Instead of seeing additional details when a user clicks on a list item after a Siri search for local businesses and points of interest in the first Developer Seed, nothing will happen.

• Users may hit errors while sending Messages with Siri using relationships or during contact disambiguation in the first Developer Seed.

SmartCards

• New SmartCard support is not available in Mail and Safari.

• New SmartCard support does not unlock iCloud keychain when unlocking screensaver. Workaround: User can follow prompts to unlock their keychain, or open Keychain Access to manually unlock.

SMB

• To improve security, SMB connections now require signing by default.

Startup Disk Preference Pane

• On OS X 10.10, macOS 10.12 volumes are not visible in the Startup Disk section of System Preferences.

Workaround: In OS X Yosemite open Terminal and run the following command:
sudo bless –folder /Volumes/[TargetDisk]/System/Library/CoreServices –setboot

VPN

• VPN connections using PPTP are insecure and no longer supported in macOS 10.12. A list of secure VPN protocols and authentication methods are available at: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT206152.

Xsan

• macOS 10.12 and Server 5.2 include support for the Xsan 5 file system. Xsan 5 is compatible with the Quantum StorNext 5.3 file system. Upgrade and migration to Xsan 5 is not supported in this release.