Mac’s Newest Operating System is Coming – Here’s What We Expect from OS X 10.12

The announcement of Apple’s OS X 10.12 is likely right around the corner, with the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference normally being held in June.

With the new operating system set to be released in a few months, we may have a new OS on our computers sooner than later. It’s time to start thinking about what we want to see from the new software – and here’s what we expect it to be able to do.

Siri On Desktop

This one is all but confirmed, with latest rumors suggesting that Apple will be including Siri in the next version of OS X. In fact, speculation has been building that Apple would be including a desktop version of Siri for a few years now, and it was somewhat surprising when Apple did not include the feature last year.

Instead of including Siri as a feature to swipe to like the Notification Center, Siri will reportedly live in the Menu Bar for the Mac, and will be located next to the search icon. When a user clicks on the icon, an interface for Siri will pop up in the top right of the screen.

The feature won’t be the first personal assistant to appear on desktop, with Cortana having been released on Windows 10. It will, however, be the first time Apple has integrated a personal assistant into its desktop computers, and it will be interesting to see how it performs.

Faster Spotlight Searches

Spotlight is fine as a tool, but it’s a little slow and isn’t always very accurate. Often it doesn’t even return items, and sometimes fails to show apps being searched for.

Instead of including new features in Spotlight, or changing the interface of the system, it would be great to see Apple polish the system until it works the way that it’s supposed to. It’s likely that Spotlight and Siri, if Siri is introduced to the Mac, will work hand in hand, with Siri being in many ways a voice controlled version of Spotlight.

Health App For OS X

While there may not be many ways to input health data on a desktop computer, desktop computers are still a great way to manage health data and look at ways to improve. The health app on the iPhone is a great system, but it’s one that could work very well in conjunction with a desktop app.

This would greatly improve the versatility of Apple’s health offerings, and will be helpful to many, especially those that have health issues that need to constantly be monitored.

iCloud Drive for External Hard Drives

Apple is boosting its iCloud Drive offerings, however when the system is in sync with a user’s Mac, the storage can take up most space on many smaller computers. It would be very helpful for plenty of users if iCloud Drive could instead sync with an external hard drive, allowing users to store most of their offline files locally without having to take up so much space on a computer.

Dark Mode

It’s nice to have dark mode features in OS X, but it would be even nicer to have a system wide Dark Mode for the operating system.

This wouldn’t only make things easier on the eyes – but many people prefer the edgier look of Dark Mode. It’s important to note that there were rumors going around suggesting that a Dark Mode reskin called Marble was being developed, however we still haven’t seen that reskin surface yet.

iCloud Time Machine

It’s great to be able to back up a computer to a hard drive, however a nice feature on mobile devices is the ability to back up the contents of a device to the cloud. While certain things are backed up to the cloud on a Mac, including things like photos, it would be nice to be able to do a Time Machine backup, that is, to entirely back up a computer, to iCloud. This would also help users who don’t want to have to buy an external hard drive or who prefer to be able to access a backup without having to carry around a hard drive. The future according to Apple is cloud-based, and Apple needs to embrace this 100 percent.

Learn More: Here’s What We Expect from Apple’s Upcoming MacBook Lineup Refresh