This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Last summer, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson went on a backpacking trip with some friends. They headed into the High Sierra, hiking toward Deadman Canyon--a fifty-mile walk through challenging terrain. Now sixty-nine, Robinson has been hiking and camping in the Sierras for half a century. At home, in Davis, California, he tracks his explorations on a wall-mounted map, its topography thick with ink.

Today, Apple is holding its Worldwide Developers Conference. So far, they have announced a host of updates. For example, during the presentation, the company noted that their watchOS 4 is going to include advanced AI and be far more personalized. Moving forward, Siri intelligence will automatically display information that is relevant to you on the face of the watch using advanced machine learning technologies that improve and "learn" over time. Ultimately, this means that the more you interact with the watch, the smarter it gets.

Apple just released the newest version of MacOS. But that doesn't mean you should install it. Despite the fact that the new software is shiny and exciting, it's also a little bit risky. So it's worth being patient, and perhaps waiting to install the new software. There's a range of reasons to wait it out until Apple has refined and updated the operating system.

You can tell by its name: The next version of Apple's macOS, High Sierra, isn't a huge and transformative update. Instead, like Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, the new OS refines what came before it. It's hard not to feel a bit disappointed, though, since last year's macOS Sierra was also a modest update. It brought Siri to the desktop and Apple Pay to the web but didn't fundamentally change how we used Macs. While the new OS isn't flashy -- you'll barely even notice you've upgraded -- it's an important stepping stone for Apple.

Apple launched the next iteration of its MacOS – High Sierra at the World Wide Developers Conference Monday. While the company did introduce the OS at the event, many of its features weren't revealed at the event. Apple's MacBooks are displayed following an Apple event in San Francisco, March 9, 2015. Siri integration in iTunes: Prior to MacOS High Sierra, Siri only used to search through iTunes, but did not offer integrative features. Siri is now more deeply integrated into the operating system and will actually let you give it some more complex commands which would require artificial intelligence to function -- for example, you could ask the voice assistant to play "rock music," and it will actually sort through your iTunes library and find music that belongs to the rock genre.

Did you have a restful weekend? Are you ready for a whole slew of Apple product news? At Apple's annual developer conference keynote on Monday, the Cupertino company announced a brand new smart speaker called HomePod, a new iPad Pro, new MacBooks and iMacs, and a lot of updates to MacOS and iOS. Below, you'll find the highlights in reverse chronological order. So if you missed the keynote, and want to experience the whole thing from start-to-finish, go on and scroll down to the bottom to start from the beginning.

Senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi claimed that the upgraded Safari tops all desktop browsers in speed: He even went as far as to say it's the world's fastest desktop browser. Apple claims that High Sierra is its fastest operating system ever, and Apple File is part of that, offering much better performance and security than before. That's apparently enough for up to 11 Teraflops of single precision (or 22 Teraflops at "half precision") processing power. The latest version of Apple's mobile operating system features a smarter version of Siri that does a better job of understanding what you need to know and presenting that information when it's relevant.

As usual, senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi is onstage detailing the latest features that Apple will bring to macOS High Sierra when it launches. The first update is for Safari, with Federighi claiming that Safari tops all desktop browsers in speed: He even went as far as to say it's the world's fastest desktop browser. A Modern Javascript test claims the new Safari is 80 percent faster than Chrome. The browser also features autoplay blocking: It detects sites that shouldn't be playing video and pauses them. Safari also will deal with the various trackers that follow us around the internet with a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention. It uses machine learning to look for cross-site trackers and "segregates" them so that they can't keep tracking you.