Preview of macOS High Sierra's tech, including Apple File System, HEVC video encoding, HEIF image format, and Metal 2
Andrew Cunningham / Ars Technica :
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after Apple previewed macOS Sierra at WWDC 2016, the company took a different tack for its follow-up: the High Sierra unveiling pitched a deliberately quiet release focused on plumbing rather than features — Safari privacy tweaks aside, the headline items were all infrastructure. This Ars Technica piece goes deeper on that plumbing: Apple File System replacing the decades-old HFS+, HEVC video encoding, the HEIF image format, and Metal 2.
The framing matters because the later High Sierra review judged the release as macOS being 'in catch-up mode' — APFS an overdue necessity rather than an innovation, eGPU support lagging Windows by years. Reading the preview against that verdict shows what Apple was actually buying with a no-frills year.
First-order effects
- Mac owners moving to High Sierra get their storage layer rebuilt underneath them — APFS replaces HFS+ as the default filesystem, a change most users never see but every app and backup tool must tolerate.
- Developers gain Metal 2 and hardware-accelerated HEVC encoding, while HEIF promises smaller image files across Photos and the camera pipeline.
Second-order effects
- The eGPU gap the review highlights puts pressure on Apple's graphics story relative to Windows, making Metal 2 less a differentiator than table stakes for pro Mac buyers weighing platforms.
- HEVC/HEIF adoption forces the surrounding software ecosystem — editors, converters, third-party apps — to add support or risk incompatibility with files produced natively on new Macs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple alternates between feature-forward and foundation-only OS years: High Sierra's under-the-hood work is explicitly continued by Mojave's foundational changes the following cycle, suggesting platform modernization (filesystem, graphics API, media codecs) is now a multi-release project rather than a single ship.
The trend: Apple has settled into a cadence of alternating infrastructure-focused macOS releases, treating filesystem, graphics, and codec modernization as multi-year groundwork laid beneath quieter annual updates.