Specifically, Lone Pine Peak is the location for macOS Sierra's default wallpaper.

[5] Its major new features concern Continuity, iCloud, and windowing, as well as support for Apple Pay and Siri.

It was released to end users on September 20, 2016, as a free upgrade through the Mac App Store[6] and it was succeeded by macOS High Sierra on September 25, 2017. macOS Sierra requires at least 2 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage space and is designed to run on the following products:[7] Sierra dropped support for various Macs released from mid 2007 to mid 2009, the first version of macOS since OS X Mountain Lion, released in 2012, to do so.

The user can access the Siri intelligent assistant via the Dock, the menu bar or a keyboard shortcut and results are shown in a window in the upper-right corner.

For instance, the user can let the system upload old files to iCloud Drive and remove their local copies, keeping them available on-demand in Finder.

APFS is intended for solid-state drives and flash memory and adopts several features found in modern file systems, such as snapshots and cloning, as well as native support for features that Apple already provides in HFS Plus through supplementary software, such as file-system encryption and TRIM support.

This can be scheduled in the System Preferences app (in the Displays menu) and can be toggled on or off in the Notification Center or using Siri.

[17] Since this feature relies on the Metal framework,[citation needed] Night Shift is not available on all systems that support macOS Sierra.

Memories contain picture slideshows with transitions and music selected by the algorithm, which can be modified to the user's liking.

[19] Safari conceals the presence of installed "legacy" plug-ins, such as Adobe Flash Player, Java applets, Microsoft Silverlight, and QuickTime – from websites and requires the user to enable a specific plug-in on a per-use or per-website basis.

[22][23] Apple Music within iTunes has been redesigned, making it simpler to find favorite songs and discover new ones.

A new default in System Preferences hides the "Anywhere" option which allows the user to disable the mechanism and execute programs from any source without needing to approve each new one individually.

This allows developers to guarantee the integrity of external files that are distributed alongside the application bundle on the same disk image.

[30] Sierra removes support for garbage collection from the Objective-C runtime,[31] a memory-management system that was added in Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) and declared deprecated in favor of Automatic Reference Counting in OS X Mountain Lion (version 10.8).

Apple removed native support for the VPN protocol PPTP and made recommendations for alternatives that it considers more secure.

Users and critics have praised its functionality, including the addition of Siri and support for Apple Pay in Safari.