macOS Sierra review: Siri and Optimized Storage features add convenience but can frustrate, as Siri lacks third-party tie-ins, and iCloud storage is too limited
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Context & Ripple Effects
When Apple unveiled macOS Sierra in June with Siri on the Mac, Apple Pay, auto unlock and universal clipboard (the WWDC announcement), the pitch was that the desktop was catching up to iOS's assistant era; Ars Technica's follow-up deep dive on Messages, Safari, Continuity and iCloud Drive changes (the Sierra feature walkthrough) framed those additions as incremental rather than transformative.
The review verdict now lands on that gap: Siri works but has no third-party app tie-ins, and Optimized Storage leans on iCloud tiers reviewers find too small to actually clear space — convenience features whose usefulness is capped by how closed the ecosystem around them is.
First-order effects
- Mac users who upgrade get Siri and Optimized Storage today, but the assistant can't act inside third-party apps and the storage feature pushes purchases of larger iCloud plans to be genuinely useful.
- Apple keeps Safari 10 available for El Capitan and Yosemite users who don't or can't move to Sierra, softening the upgrade cliff while still steering holdouts toward the new release.
Second-order effects
- Developers watching Siri ship without third-party hooks see Apple reserving the Mac's assistant layer for first-party use, which pressures them to keep building their own in-app assistants or wait for an API.
- iCloud becomes the monetization tail on a free OS update: if Optimized Storage only works well with paid tiers, the review's criticism effectively prices the headline feature in subscription dollars.
Third-order effects
- If each macOS cycle follows this pattern — Mojave later continued the incremental cadence with Dark Mode and Finder redesigns, per its beta coverage — the Mac settles into annual refinement releases where platform openness of new features, not feature count, becomes the review battleground.
- Assistant-on-desktop reviews like this one set the template critics apply years later, including to AI-era updates like the Sequoia review that judged the OS partly by which intelligence features were missing — making third-party access to system assistants a durable structural question for Apple.
The trend: Desktop operating systems are shifting from selling new features outright to gating them behind first-party services and closed assistant layers, with reviewer pushback on openness becoming part of every release cycle.