I’ve written from time to time about the difficulties in making money from online ads, and it only gets worse. When banners didn’t do the job, they became animated. When animated banners didn’t do the job, they became full-blown multimedia presentations. But in the endless effort to boost ad revenue — or at least get people to pay attention — the nature of the ads have become more and more offensive.

Sometimes you access a site, and a large ad drops into view, and the background is often grayed out. It’s not a pop-up; most browsers turn those awful things off by default. It’s an interstitial ad, and you can only rid yourself of it after a set amount of time, or by pressing an “X” that you might have to search for.

Yet another offensive online ad comes from the usual process that begins on a Mac or a PC when you insert an optical disc with some sort of audio or video presentation on it. Unless you’ve altered the preference, it will begin to play a few seconds after the media is loaded. So someone had the bright idea of doing the same thing with online ads.

Now I honestly don’t know where it started — and it doesn’t really matter anymore — but one day I visited one of my favored sites, only to have my ears assaulted by an unwanted video. Actually, it was a news clip from CNN, but it was preceded by an ad that resembled the usual TV spot.

But I didn’t select it, I didn’t press Play by mistake. I didn’t do anything but open a text article to read. I quickly clicked the Stop button to turn it off and went about my business.

Some time later, I was recording an episode for one of my radio shows. During those sessions, I will occasionally do a little fast online research to find a relevant fact, or raise a subject I should question a guest about. Well, every so often, I will be talking about something, which means my mic is live, and something will begin to play in the background. I’ll shut it off quickly, and do a retake.

At other times, I might be listening to the playback of some online program, only to be interrupted, once again, by the dreaded autoplay.

Yes, I know about browser plugins that can dispatch Autoplay. But stay with me.

With macOS Sierra, Apple made it easy to kill the audio in Safari, by clicking the speaker icon in the address bar. But it doesn’t stop the audio from starting; it’s just an easy way to click Stop.

I would love to have a conversation with the people who run sites from CNN, HuffPost, Macworld, USA Today and countless others that offend visitors this way. Do they really think people don’t care about putting up with the unwanted playback of a multimedia presentation? Is this some trick to force you to pay attention, the better to get you to consider someone’s product or service?

Well, perhaps the same people who make telemarketing phone calls, I suppose. They somehow believe that if they call you up unsolicited and annoy you with something you didn’t ask for, at a time that might intrude on your privacy, that’s perfectly all right. In the end, there will be enough new business for it to make sense.

So Apple is going to try to help stop the din of unwanted videos with Safari for macOS High Sierra. Among the new features is Autoplay Blocking, which will stop the automatic playback from those sites.

Just like that!

Yet another feature in Safari allows you to automatically open articles with Reader, in a clean format unencumbered by ads. These two features are undeniably useful, particularly when it comes to the product of web developers — or their employers — who don’t care about people or their desire to be treated with respect.

But as with ad blockers, it will also make it that much harder for people to earn revenue from web ads. What started as a minor irritant has morphed into a major annoyance, resulting in total disrespect for the people who visit such sites.

Unfortunately, people who play by the rules, and attempt to keep the ads in the background or in sidebars, and aren’t putting such promotions in your face, will suffer financially from the need to stop such unwanted behavior. Thus everyone loses a little bit, or more than a little bit.

Now I have installed an anti-adblocking plugin on my blogs. You can ignore it if you like, but it’s merely a request for you to adjust your adblocker, if possible, to allow the ads we run to appear. That should help us earn a little extra money, but I’ve also been in touch with a company that makes adblockers, and they will allow our ads to appear if we agree to give them a piece of the action, or pay a monthly fee. I can’t help but feel I’m paying something akin to ransom, but I need the money and so I’ll probably strike a deal.

In the meantime, Apple is making the right move with its changes in High Sierra. Browsers that don’t offer similar features will probably include them too before long.

While High Sierra is supposed to be mostly a bug fix and performance update, if you look at the feature set, you’ll find a decent range of enhancements that will make your Mac user experience more enjoyable, and, one hopes, snappier and more reliable. I’m looking forward to it, and the freedom from those autoplay ads will be high on the list of features I’m eager to try.

When Apple began to make a few alterations to the macOS to adopt features from iOS, you can bet that some Mac users howled. So being able to switch the direction of scrolling to the “natural” direction used on iPhones and iPads, and other minor interface alterations, were sharply criticized.

There was a method in Apple’s apparent madness, and it wasn’t to kill the Mac. It was more about making it possible for you to do some things the same way on the two platforms. But the Mac remained the Mac and iOS gear remained separate, even though the operating systems are all descended from the same source.

For some, it was expected that the macOS was surely on the way out, and you’d soon run iOS on Macs. But using a mouse or a trackpad with a physical keyboard are different than working exclusively on a touchscreen. Obviously the end results must be essentially the same, and so Apple had to adapt the systems to conform.

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Apple’s OS schedule this year is pretty much the same as last year’s. Developers have already received real early beta versions of iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, tvOS 11 and watchOS 4. A few weeks later, regular Apple customers should be able to share in the joy; well, except for watchOS 4. The Apple TV OS is being offered via the public beta program for the first time.

A key reason why watchOS isn’t offered is, if you get into trouble, you’d have to ship your Apple Watch back to Apple to set things right, maybe replace it. But that doesn’t mean you should be cavalier about running beta operating systems on your other Apple gear. It can be fun, but it can also be downright infuriating, because there may be all sorts of bugs, discovered and otherwise, waiting to bite.

With iOS 11, if you must revert back to the previous version, it’s tricky. You’d have to download the installer file for your device from a third-party source to restore it. It’s not difficult, but if you use your iPhone or iPad for actually doing something, you may just want to sit it out for a while.

It can be worse with your Mac. This year, Apple is releasing a new file system, Apple File System or APFS, with High Sierra. There are some known problems, and this is the sort of thing that can damage your drive’s directory, and thus has the potential of wiping your data. That’s before you get to any problems with the OS itself and Apple’s installed apps.

While some developers will rush preliminary High Sierra updates for their products, others may wait until the final release or shortly before to make sure they are testing their apps against the version that will ship to everyone. Changes along the way can make for moving targets, thus stretching a developer’s resources to keep up. Some might not even bother until there’s a final release, and maybe not until the first bug fix update.

Now I realize I have to stay abreast of current technology, so I will run the betas, after a while, but with a sense of caution. In the old days, I always had a spare Mac or iPhone at hand to use as a test instrument. But I no longer have the luxury — or resources — to buy extra gear.

With my iPhone, I can certainly restore it, using the unofficial workaround above. But I won’t even bother to try iOS 11 until I’m confident that it is reasonably reliable. With iOS 10, it didn’t take long. With the earliest betas, apps crashed a lot, but I put up with it for the most part and persevered.

Before I installed the beta, however, I made a backup with iTunes just in case. iCloud is a perfect substitute.

With my iMac, I can use an external drive to store the beta OS. Or just create a second partition on the startup drive for testing. I will be extra careful, though, with APFS, and strictly rely on another drive if I want to give it a whirl.

Last year, Sierra took a while to settle down. I had it running on a second partition, and I couldn’t even properly install a couple of the early versions and updates.

Finally I decided to go for it. I made a full clone backup, combined my iMac’s two partitions, and installed a late beta of Sierra. The weeks of caution paid off, as the final releases were stable enough to actually get work done and still enjoy the new features.

But that’s highly unpredictable.

I did notice that there’s now a beta version of Carbon Copy Cloner, my current preferred backup tool, with preliminary support for APFS. That’s encouraging.

But my best recommendation, based on several decades of loyal and sometimes exasperated beta testing, is to hold off installing anything until you check the tech sites (we didn’t have that option in the old days) and see what others are encountering. I’ll let you know how things are working for me as I proceed through the process.

If it doesn’t seem stable to you, or the apps you want to run won’t work, or barely work, nothing is lost in leaving well enough alone. When the new operating systems are stable enough for release — and that’ll probably happen beginning in mid-September —  you can prepare to install them.

That said, I’m looking forward to the new operating systems for different reasons. With High Sierra, there’s are lots of improvements to Safari, which has been my preferred browser for years. I appreciate the fact that those annoying autoplay videos won’t play unless I want them to. Maybe the people who run such sites as CNN, HuffPost, USA Today and, yes, Macworld, will take the hint. APFS interests me too, mostly for its potential of improved performance and reliability.

I also hope Apple takes the occasion to clean up some of Safari’s notorious memory hogging bugs.

Since I’ve been advocating for better productivity capabilities on the iPad, particularly improved multitasking, and direct access to the file system, I’m anxious to give iOS 11 a try. It doesn’t mean I will suddenly adopt an iPad to do my work, unless Apple has quietly changed the conditions of its sandboxing scheme to allow for apps to record and mix audio streams from other apps.  We’ll see what’s possible.

Let’s not forget that Apple Inc. used to be known as Apple Computer Inc. But in 2007, with the launch of the iPhone, the word “Computer” vanished. What changed?

It’s not that Apple suddenly stopped making Macs, or didn’t built other products over the years. Don’t forget that the original PostScript printer, the Apple LaserWriter, along with Aldus PageMaker, upended an industry. But, beginning in 2001, a brand new gadget sort of snuck in and began to demonstrate Apple’s future direction.

The iPod at first appeared to be little more than a costly indulgence on the part of Steve Jobs. The promise of 1,000 songs in your pocket was certainly a neat idea, but its $399 price tag seemed a bit much. Sure, there were other MP3 players then, but they had awful user interfaces, and transferring tracks to those devices was a slow process.

The iPod — which used iTunes to manage the downloads and your playlists — caught on. But it really soared when Apple decided to share the joy with Windows users and offer a PC version of iTunes.

Over the years, Apple beat back all comers, even Microsoft.

But the best iPod arrived in 2007 as part of a tiny personal computer known as the iPhone. It didn’t take too many years before a smartphone became Apple’s most successful product. While Mac sales by and large continued to increase, to some it became little more than a legacy product, receiving mostly modest updates to keep up.

It got really bad in late 2016 when, after only one other Mac got an update — a simple MacBook refresh that spring — a controversial refresh of the MacBook Pro arrived. I suppose a basic update of the existing model with new parts might have been less polarizing. But the upgraded model was slimmer and lighter, with a short-travel keyboard in the spirit of the MacBook and the Magic Keyboard. But it had a controversial feature, the Touch Bar. A single OLED touch strip replaced the traditional function keys. Apple opened up the technology to third parties, so they could build their own custom keys. It should have been a good thing, too, but…

For some reason, customers decided that the MacBook Pro should have supported 32GB of RAM, even though previous models — and the Microsoft Surface notebooks — topped out at 16GB. Apple’s worst transgression was not using the latest Intel silicon, code-named Kaby Lake. Ignored was the fact that the quad-core chips that Apple uses in its high-end notebooks hadn’t shipped yet. And did I mention that the new models cost several hundred dollars more?

Some Mac users felt Apple was paying lip service to the platform, despite the fact that developing the Touch Bar couldn’t have been an easy thing to do. Indeed, it meant there was a second OS and processor onboard, derived from iOS with an ARM-based system-on-a-chip based on the one on the Apple Watch.

Despite the complaints, Mac sales, which had been flagging through much of the year, increased slightly. But it wasn’t just pent-up demand for the MacBook Pro, because sales continued to grow during the March quarter. At the same time, sales of the Microsoft Surface — which the critics continue to demand that Apple imitate — fell by 26%.

But what about the Mac Pro, which hadn’t received any updates since 2013?

Half-hearted assurances that Apple loved pros didn’t help. In early April, they summoned a handful of carefully selected tech reporters to its Cupertino headquarters for a roundtable. Yes, Apple planned to release a brand new modular Mac Pro, but not this year. It would also be joined by a new display. This year, there would be an iMac with pro options, and even the tiny Mac mini appeared to have the love.

Ahead of the WWDC, rumors appeared that the MacBook Pro would receive an update months ahead of the usual timetable. There would also be updates for the MacBook and perhaps the MacBook Air.

But that wasn’t the half of it.

During the WWDC, the volume Macs got plenty of love. As predicted, the MacBook Pro and its brethren received the expected upgrades. Kaby Lake CPUs were also added to the MacBook; the MacBook Air got a minor update of the Broadwell processor it was already using. Even more interesting, early reports of benchmarks indicate that the newest 15-inch MacBook Pro may be up to 20% faster in multicore tasks than its predecessor.

The real surprise was the announcement of brand new iMacs, with the expected processor upgrades. The model with pro features ended up being a whole new line, dubbed iMac Pro, in which the guts of what you’d expect to see in a Mac Pro workstation were stuffed inside. Apple had to build an upgraded thermal system with 80% greater capacity to support an 18-core Xeon, AMD Radeon Pro Vega graphics, and up to 128GB of costly ECC RAM.

As you  might expect, the iMac Pro, expected in December, will be an expensive beast. The entry-level model will start at $4,999, although Apple claims that PC workstations with similar capabilities would generally cost over $7,000. Optioned to the hilt with those 18 core Xeons, maxed out RAM and graphics, plus 4TB of SSD storage, an iMac Pro will cost well over $10,000.

And, Apple is still promising an even more powerful Mac Pro for next year.

The next macOS, code-named High Sierra, will offer beefed up support for Metal graphics and other features, along with a modern file system sporting higher performance and enhanced security. The better to serve the needs of Mac professionals.

The Mac mini? Well, maybe later in the year, maybe not. There was hope in Apple’s brief statements about it during that April roundtable.

Even more interesting, iOS 11 will offer enhanced multitasking for iPads. It will feature a Mac-like dock and a Files app that appears to be the equivalent of putting a macOS Finder on Apple’s tablet. What this means is that Apple now realizes that, to make an iPad more productive, it needs to adapt some Mac features.

But does an iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard combine to become Apple’s answer to the 2-in-1 PC? Is it a true merger of a toaster oven and a refrigerator that actually makes sense?

So the Mac is getting the love, and the iPad is being influenced by the Mac. Long-time Mac users must be smiling from ear to ear.