macOS High Sierra developer beta 2 rolling out on the Mac App Store

Zac Hall | Jun 21 2017 - 1:06 pm PT

The second developer beta of macOS High Sierra is rolling out now on the Mac App Store. macOS High Sierra includes the Apple File System, HEVC support, Metal 2, improvements to Mail, Photos, and Safari, and more. We’ll update below if any new changes are discovered in macOS High Sierra beta 2.

For more on macOS High Sierra, check out these stories:

From the macOS 10.13 beta 2 release notes:

Notes and Known Issues

General

New Features

• AddedAVRoutePickerViewtotheAVKitframeworkandAVRouteDetectortothe AVFoundation framework for enabling users to choose the route for playing content when multiple routes are available. Use AVRouteDetector to determine if multiple routes are available when route detection is enabled. If multiple routes are available, use AVRoutePickerView to present an interface for the user to choose the routes. The functionality of AVRoutePickerView is disabled in this beta.

3rd Party Apps

New Issues

• League of Legends may quit unexpectedly on Mac models from 2012 and later.

Resolved Issues

• Microsoft Outlook 15.35 and later now launch on macOS 10.13 beta.

Accessibility

Resolved Issues

• Enabling Dwell Control during an upgrade from macOS Sierra to macOS 10.13 beta no longer blocks the use of the system clock, other menu extras, the Assistive Control, or the Accessibility Preference pane. (32515238)

Apple File System (APFS)

New Issues

• Encrypted APFS volumes can’t be decrypted. Decryption support will be added in an upcoming beta.

Resolved Issues

• Fixed an issue that prevented enabling FileVault on APFS volumes.

Known Issues

Unsupported configurations in this seed release:

HDD-only Macs currently are not converted to APFS by default.

Some iMacs with 3TB Fusion drives and BootCamp may be unsupported for use with APFS.

APFS support for Mid 2012 Mac Pro will be included in an upcoming seed.

An APFS container on a Fusion drive can have only 1 macOS 10.13 volume.

The encryption policy used for unencrypted APFS volumes that are converted to FileVault can cause the system to select the wrong block offset during the encryption process. This issue will be resolved in an upcoming beta, and will require the affected volumes to be re- encrypted. Encrypted HFS+ volumes that have are converted to APFS are unaffected.

There is a known issue where APFS systems with FileVault enabled cannot reset their password with iCloud.

Resizing APFS containers is currently not supported in Disk Utility.
Workaround: In Terminal, use the diskutil tool to resize APFS containers.

Some third-party applications may not correctly recognize volumes that are formatted
using APFS.

CloudKit

Known Issues

CloudKit does not support unsigned long long values with the high-order bit set. (30567424)

ApplicationsthatuseCKModifyRecordsOperationshouldspecifyanappropriate value for CKModifyRecordsOperation.isAtomic. if your client is compiled against watchOS 4.0, operations enqueued against the default CKRecordZone have new behavior because atomic is true by default. If the operation hits a “preflight” failure (most commonly, a network issue uploading a CKAsset, or a malformed CKRecord), the entire operation is canceled. (30838858)
Content Caching > Share Internet connection

Resolved Issues

• Closing and then reopening System Preferences no longer causes the Content Caching service to restart.

Known Issues

• Tethered iOS devices use only Wi-Fi when both Wi-Fi and USB Ethernet are available.

Workaround: Disable Wi-Fi on the tethered iOS devices. FaceTime

Known Issues

• Live Photo support will be added in an upcoming beta.

FileVault

Resolved Issues

• When iCloud recovery is enabled on an encrypted APFS volume, Password Reset no longer shows an error that iCloud recover is not enabled.

Finder

New Issues

• When copying files the progress indicator may persist after the copy completes.

Workaround: Log out of your account and log back in, or restart your Mac.

• Foundation

New Features

AddedaschedulingAPItoURLSessionTaskthatallowsbackgroundURLSession clients to schedule tasks in the future, enabling easy background app refresh semantics for apps, watchOS complications, and more. The API also allows developers to update requests before transmission to address cases where the request has become stale when scheduled in the future. Additions include the earliestBeginDate, countOfBytesClientExpectsToSend, and countOfBytesClientExpectsToReceive properties of URSessionTask, and the URLSession:task:willBeginDelayedRequest:completionHandler method of URLSessionTaskDelegate protocol. (27866330)

URLSessionTask adopts the ProgressReporting protocol providing a consistent mechanism for URLSession clients to track the progress of URLSessionTask using the new progress property. (30834550)

AddedanAdaptableConnectivityAPItoURLSessionthatenablestaskstoautomatically monitor and wait for satisfactory network connectivity, instead of immediately failing with an error when connectivity is unsatisfactory. Additions include the waitsForConnectivity property of URLSessionConfiguration and the URLSession:taskIsWaitingForConnectivity: method of the URLSessionTaskDelegate protocol.

Added support for HTTP brotli content encoding to URLSession. By default, HTTP requests contain a br value (in addition to gzip and deflate) for the Accept-Encoding HTTP header, informing the web server that the user agent supports brotli encoding. The web server can send an HTTP body with Content-Encoding: br in the HTTP header to indicate that the content is brotli-encoded. URLSession automatically decompresses the HTTP body data and passes the decoded data back to the client in the same way it does for Content-Encoding: gzip. For binary compatibility reasons, URLSession brotli support is enabled only for apps built using the macOS 10.13 SDK. (27724985)
Resolved Issues

• Reads and writes on a secure connection that use the new authenticating HTTPS proxy feature of URLSessionStreamTask now work correctly. (31916868)

HEVC and HEIF Images

Known Issues

macOS 10.13 adds HEVC and HEIF decode capability. In order to display HEIF image files or HEVC videos captured on iOS 11, your Mac needs to be updated to macOS 10.13.

The specific hardware and software requirements for HEVC and HEIF are detailed in the WWDC 2017 presentations covering these new technologies. Depending on the capabilities of your Mac and the needs of your content, AVFoundation may use a software-based HEVC encoder which typically has longer encoding times. Further fine- tuning of the encoding quality will occur in subsequent seeds.

Third-party apps that do not rely on the macOS-provided media frameworks may not properly handle these new formats.

iCloud

Known Issues

• When you initially login to iCloud on macOS 10.13, you may find that some services do not sync correctly. If this happens, please log out of iCloud and log back in. This should allow your account to login fully and sync all services.

Installer

Resolved Issues

• Reinstalling macOS 10.13 from the Recovery OS no longer requires using Disk Utility to unlock your FileVault-encrypted volume.

Kernel Extension Loading

Known Issues

Some third-party apps may not fully handle instances where their kernel extension is denied user consent to load.

Kernel extensions blocked in early boot do not display an alert.
Localization

New Features
• Hindi localization has been added to macOS.

Known Issues

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

• Some languages may have clipped or misaligned layout.

Mac App Store

Resolved Issues

• Device-based Volume Purchase Program apps now install correctly.

Messages

Resolved Issues

• Enabling iCloud Messages now works if the Mac is not connected to the internet.

Metal

Known Issues

• Reflections may return incorrect information.

• Debug layers can generate false warnings about Indirect Argument Buffer sizes.

NetInstall

Known Issues

• NetInstall is not supported in this beta.
• System Image Utility does not work with APFS volumes.

Networking

New Issues

• Wi-Fi password sharing and Personal Hotspot sharing on beta 2 don’t work with devices running beta 1. (32500217)

OpenCL

Resolved Issues

• Simulator now works on the Mid-2010 MacBook Pro models with an NVIDIA 320m.

Password Reset

Known Issues

• Password Reset states that iCloud recovery is not enabled on an encrypted APFS volume even if it is enabled.

Photos

Resolved Issues

• Photos no longer unexpectedly quits when importing a folder that contains sub-folders.

• Photos no longer fail to import from iOS 10 devices.

Printing

New Issues

• Printing documents with headers and footers may result in garbled or blank output, or in the application quitting unexpectedly.

Workaround: Disable printing of headers and footers in the Print dialog. Safari

New Issues

Bookmarks in the Favorites Bar or in the Bookmarks Menu may be missing.
Workaround: Add the bookmarks back to favorites or to the menu from the Bookmarks Sidebar. To open the sidebar, choose View > Show Bookmarks Sidebar.

Switching to full screen video, or scrubbing video in YouTube may result in the video content no longer updating even though audio continues to play.
Resolved Issues

• Search suggestions now appear in Safari.

Known Issues

• Changed the syncing system for Safari Bookmarks and Reading List across iCloud- enabled devices. Please report any bugs.

Setup Assistant

Resolved Issues

• Enabling FileVault in Setup Assistant no longer causes the system to hang in the “Setting Up Your Mac” dialog.

Known Issues

• Setup Assistant does not support migrating iTunes. Users should refrain from updating iTunes if prompted during Migration.

Workaround: iTunes can be updated later using Software Update. Siri

Known Issues

All Siri requests fail if iTunes is open in the background.
Workaround: Quit iTunes when you want to make Siri requests.

Switching Siri’s voice from the settings screen plays a voice that is not the default voice for several languages. The issue is resolved when the assets finishing downloading in the background.
Software Update

New Issues

Macs with a volume formatted using HFS+ may reboot even if the update did not occur. To find out if the updated installed, choose About this Mac from the Apple menu, and check the system version in the window that appears.

After starting a software update, the installation progress may not be displayed for up to fifteen minutes. Do not reboot your Mac during this time.

The Mac may be stuck at a black screen with a cursor then first time you log in after a software update.
Workaround: Restart your Mac. Vision

Resolved Issues

RectangleTracker no longer stops responding unexpectedly.

The Vision API is now available from the macOS 10.13 and iOS 11 SDKs even if
DEPLOYMENT_TARGET is set to a version earlier than the current OS. Known Issues

• Facial landmarks identified by the Vision framework may flicker in temporal use cases, such as video.

Xcode

Resolved Issues

• Xcode 8 and earlier is now supported in macOS 10.13 Beta. (32146593)