Apple seeded macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 Developer Beta 4 on Monday. The two biggest known new features in this release cycle are Messages on iCloud and Business Chat. Users will also find the gorgeous wallpaper included with iMac Pro, shown below.
Messages on iCloud
This feature shifts local storage of iMessages to iCloud. Rather than storying everything locally and syncing everything up when you use your individual Apple devices, those devices will instead pull just recent messages from iCloud.
If you have lots of iMessages chats and group chats going—and if those chats are image, movie, or other files-heavy, this will save you gobs of space. For instance, my Messages folder is currently 11GB and growing. It will also make syncing on devices you don’t use every day a lot faster.
Business Chat
Andrew Orr wrote up a great piece about Business Chat. Cribbing from that, Business Chat will work across Apple’s devices like iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, but not the Mac. Apple customers can start a conversation with a business from Safari, Maps, Spotlight, and Siri.
Apple Developer Betas
Developers can provision their Macs at the Apple Developer Connection. Macs that have been provisioned for the developer beta program will find the update in the Mac App Store.
I turned off Messages in the cloud on my ßeta – only have 5GB iCloud and frankly these days, that’s all email. Couldn’t help with testing on that, but I have to wonder how many others don’t want to add Messages to their iCloud burden. I long for the days when my Mac was the centre of my digital hub – purchases, images, mail and messages, all backed up by me and I dream of my Mac syncing that to my devices, preferably by wifi. The fascination with the cloud is over. Most especially in the current security environment. My data, my computer – we don’t need no stinking clouds. Eventually Apple’s interdependent features will collapse in on their own complexity and Messages In The Cloud might be the beginning of this.