macOS 10.13.4 High Sierra Adds Business Chat and External GPU Support

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/03/30/macos-10-13-4-high-sierra-adds-business-chat-and-external-gpu-support/

macOS 10.13.4 doesn’t add any major features for most users, but it includes some welcome new features and fixes for professional users.

So is anyone using an external GPU? I have to admit that this is the first I’ve heard of such a thing.

It was one of the big promises of Thunderbolt, and was supposed to make up for a lack of internal expandability in Macs, especially the 2013 Mac Pro. I’m flabbergasted it took until now to implement.

They mentioned it at last year’s WWDC. It is more geared for GPU intensive processing than it is for games, and it evidently needs TB3 on the Mac to be useful.


Where is the indication of business chat in Spotlight? (I did find a link when using Maps, so sent a message to Home Depot asking if they have special hours tomorrow. It’s been 3 minutes and no reply as yet. Maybe they only work weekdays?

I haven’t been able to find any indication of Business Chat outside of Maps and one Web site (1-800-FLOWERS).

QuickLook has been badly broken since High Sierra was released. Late betas of 10.13.3 had it working again, but the fix was pulled before the release. Finally in 10.13.4 we have a functional QuickLook again. Cause for celebration!

(Broken = tendency to take ages to display an image, not to allow paging with multi-page documents like spreadsheets and PDFs, consume vast amounts of memory and never release it, etc. Since I use QuickLook a lot, I was constantly having to force-quit QuickLookUIService processes. No more.)

Hey, glad to hear it’s fixed for you! I use Quick Look really heavily as well, and I hadn’t noticed any problems in High Sierra, so it’s possible that there was some sort of other conflict going on that Apple finally figured out and fixed.

Well, 10.13.4 had a fix that meant something to me! The Finder now correctly displays the image thumbnails for the Sony A7R III RAW images - that was missing in the original support for this camera. Sony seems to change the RAW format with each new camera and it takes Apple a couple of tries to get it right. I reported this bug and after some exchanges with tech, it was marked as a duplicate, and then fixed in 10.13.4. I must say Apple is getting more responsive on these bug reports.

David

A post was merged into an existing topic: Security Update 2018-002 (Sierra and El Capitan)

I was using my iPad 2 as a second display using Duet Display. 10.13.4 broke my ability to do that. I have not yet been able to find a work around that works on my system (iMac 21.5-inch, Mid 2010). The Duet Display developers recommend staying on 10.13.3.

Looks like this is affecting a bunch of apps that provide secondary displays.

Ever since applying the 10.13.4 update my Safari window does not preserve its size. Has anybody else seen this?

I used to always have my new Safari windows pop up at a certain size that I once set a long time ago. Now, after the update, Safari choses to open new windows with the same width, but larger height than I had originally set. It’s not quite the full vertical screen size, but close. I have tried scaling the window back down in size, but after restarting Safari, its back to its own stubborn setting. Any ideas?

Yes, someone else just reported this over in:

Thanks for the heads-up, Adam. :)

Just discovered the improved Account Migration feature of High Sierra.
When you transfer accounts from another Mac, or whatever, it now prompts you to create a new password for these accounts. (This was done using 10.13.4, so not sure if it is true of earlier versions of High Sierra.) This is a much more sensible approach, since you are likely to be using such accounts as a starting point rather than using them as a backup.