![]() Having said this, let’s go through the quite large list of improvements and new features Apple has added on top of OS X Yosemite to obtain the polished OS X El Capitan. On the whole, after using it from the very beginning after the release of the first beta for developers since the launch of the final version, installing OS X 10.11 El Capitan on your Mac will transform it completely by both changing the way you use it on a daily basis, as well as by adding a sensible boost in speed for most default apps, even though it will look like the same old computer you’ve had on your desk. Mission Control especially feels like a whole other beast on OS X El Capitan due to the slightly tweaked look with the desktop previews on top removed and replaced with simple text labels, and the evident boost in performance. The biggest improvement is the launch speed of most apps which, coupled with the easily noticeable snappier Mission, makes the managing apps a lot smoother and effortless. Even though it does look quite similar to the Lucida Grande font used in OS X Yosemite, Apple made the change to promote readability and, most probably, a continuous user experience over their entire platform, regardless of the OS each device is running. ![]() The other difference to OS X Yosemite I immediately noticed was the new San Francisco font Apple has also set as the default typeface on iOS and watchOS. One of the first changes I noticed after first running El Capitan on the two test Macs, was the cursor call out feature designed to make it simpler to find the mouse pointer and I’m sure that everyone else will do too, seeing that Apple made it quite easy to activate. I must also emphasize that when I say processor-intensive apps, I mean they weren’t applications that one would use on a daily basis, so if you’re not using your Mac for anything unusual, all the apps that you’ll run on El Capitan will buzz along unperturbed. The important thing, though, is that each time that happened, the two test computers’ behavior was consistent to what I’ve observed when they were running OS X Yosemite, so having El Capitan installed was not the problem. From what I’ve been able to see during the test period, the OS X 10.11 performance was pretty much the same in both cases, with obvious differences when running processor-intensive applications in which cases the Mac Pro strolled along unfazed, while the iMac did its best to get the task finished. My test devices were a Mac Pro with two quad-core processors and 12 GB of RAM, and a dual-core iMac Mid 2007 with 6 GB of RAM to make it easier to pinpoint any difference in performance. The good news is that once System Integrity Protection is disabled, most apps will start with no problems and go on about their business like nothing ever happened.Īs was the case with the 2009 OS X Snow Leopard release, Apple stopped working on overhauling their operating system’s interface and decided that OS X El Capitan is all about boosting up overall performance and tweaking the interface to provide the user with the fastest possible way of doing things using the same GUI available in OS X Yosemite, with minor changes where they were needed. To make it easier for everyone else to get past similar problems, in most cases the problem was the newly added System Integrity Protection El Capitan feature that wreaks havoc among third-party applications by not allowing them to modify a number of files and folders. Moreover, most of the issues I found had to do with OS X applications not being yet fully compatible with El Capitan. I’ve added the complete list of all Mac models compatible with OS X El Capitan at the end of this review, but if your Mac already has OS X Yosemite you can go on and hit the “Update” button next to El Capitan in the Mac App Store.Īfter keeping tabs on everything that changed between the first El Capitan beta version until now, I can say that even though I met my fair share of bugs and issues, there haven’t been any outstanding ones that would have prevented my test Macs to be used in production. El Capitan’s first beta was released to developers on June 9, and the final version has been released today, September 30, as a free Mac App Store update, ready to be installed on all Macs already running OS X 10.10 Yosemite. ![]() Apple announced OS X 10.11 El Capitan during the 2015 WWDC keynote on June 8.
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