El Capitan adds a healthy dose of extra performance and long-awaited refinements to the sometimes sluggish Yosemite

Sep 30, 2015 10:04 GMT  ·  By

Apple announced OS X 10.11 El Capitan during the 2015 WWDC keynote on June 8. 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.

NEW FEATURES IMPROVEMENTS
COMPATIBILITY CONCLUSION

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.

After 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. Moreover, most of the issues I found had to do with OS X applications not being yet fully compatible with El Capitan.

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. 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.

As 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.

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. 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.

OS X El Capitan
OS X El Capitan

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. 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.

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.

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. 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 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. 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.

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.

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.

NEW FEATURES

System Integrity Protection

Probably the most prominent new feature added in OS X El Capitan is the System Integrity Protection (also known as rootless), designed to allow the OS to protect some system processes, as well as a number of folders and files from being modified by other processes running on the Mac.

Having System Integrity Protection enabled on a Mac running El Capitan means that even if you can log in as root and run processes using sudo, you will still be unable to modify any of the protected files and processes.

Moreover, System Integrity Protection is enabled by default after you install El Capitan on your Mac, so if you want to have full control over your Mac, the only way to do it is to disable the rootless feature.

San Francisco font

OS X El Capitan comes with a completely new (yet very similar) font named San Francisco, which replaces the old Lucida Grande as the default operating system typeface.

If it seems familiar, that is because you’ve already seen it in Apple’s other operating systems, iOS 9 and watchOS, where San Francisco is also the default font.

If you haven’t noticed any difference after first seeing El Capitan’s interface, you won’t be able to notice it afterwards because San Francisco is pretty much the same font as Lucida Grande with some tweaks to make it slightly easier to read on both mobile and desktop devices.

Auto-hide menu bar

The new OS X release makes it simple to also hide the menu bar if you need more screen estate, not only the Dock. This works pretty similar to when the Dock is hidden: when the auto-hide mode is enabled, the menu bar goes away on its own, and it will only appear again if you hove the mouse pointer to the top of the screen.

Enabling auto-hide for the menu bar
Enabling auto-hide for the menu bar

Copy resume in Finder

The finder has also received a new feature: a much-awaited and quite useful copy resume feature designed to make it simpler to continue copying or moving files from one folder to another even after you’ve shut down your Mac midway on purpose or accidentally.

Shake to locate the mouse pointer

If you have a display with at least a full HD resolution, you know very well that your mouse’s pointer is one of the hardest things to hunt down in the swarm of windows you have opened on your desktop.

However, after installing El Capitan, this will pop up on its own: the mouse pointer will automatically zoom in-and-out when you shake the mouse, allowing you to locate anywhere on screen.

The mouse pointer zoom feature
The mouse pointer zoom feature

Even though I considered it just a gimmick and quite annoying at first, I got used to it while using El Capitan for a couple of weeks and I re-assessed my opinion, realizing that I’ve been triggering this little gem of a feature, on and off, at least a dozen times a day.

However, if you don’t like it or you find yourself activating it by mistake, the mouse pointer zoom feature can be disabled by going into OS X’s System Preferences, in the Accessibility preference pane, the Display tab and unchecking the “Shake the mouse pointer to locate” option.

IMPROVEMENTS

The fact that OS X El Capitan is a release mainly focused on refining the user experience and boosting the overall performance translates into a slew of improvements, more or less visible to the end-user.

Metal support

Apple's Metal graphics API is probably the most important improvement in OS X El Capitan because it will make a huge difference on any Mac that supports it. According to Apple, Metal works by speeding up Core Graphics and Core Animation for a 50% faster system level rendering speed, with an increased efficiency of up to 40% across the board.

Metal is already supported by all default apps in OS X as they've all been updated to come with support for Metal, and third-party apps should also receive updates adding support for Metal on the same day El Capitan is released or in the next few days if their development teams have waited for the official release of OS X 10.11 to test their applications' Metal support.

The difference in speed and efficiency will be obvious while playing games and when using professional video and image editing applications that utilize both the CPU and the GPU.

If you have a slower Mac, and you think that the addition of Metal in OS X El Capitan will suddenly make it as fast as a cheetah overnight, think again because, as disclosed by Apple’s Rav Dhiraj during his "What's new in Metal, Part 1" presentation at WWDC 2015, Metal will only be supported by Macs introduced since 2012.

To be more exact if you don’t have a Mac with an AMD R9, Intel HD Grapics, Iris 5000 or 6000, nvidia GT 600M or 700M GPU, you’re out of luck.

App and window management

After introducing the full-screen toggle button in OS X Yosemite, Apple now adds a new feature in El Capitan: split view. This allows you to enable the full-screen mode for any app that supports it and then drag and drop any other application next to it to obtain a vertically split space with the two full-screen apps sharing the entire screen.

The full-screen split-view feature
The full-screen split-view feature

While in split view, you can effortlessly resize any of the two apps' interfaces by dragging the divider between them with your mouse. It would have been nice if Apple had also added a horizontal split, for when the user needs more screen estate in an app in terms of width, not height.

Mail

Apple's Mail app, the e-mail client of choice for the vast majority of OS X users, is now a lot easier to use on Macs that have a trackpad and it now allows its users to mark or delete e-mails and conversations using a simple finger swipe on the trackpad on El Capitan.

This is a very familiar gesture to all iOS users and might also be a possible motivation behind Apple's decision to make their OS X e-mail client more iOS-friendly.

Moreover, if an e-mail contains information that can be interpreted to be an event, Mail automatically detects it and allows the user to add it to a calendar event with a simple mouse click.

In El Capitan, the Mail application will also allow you in El Capitan to stay in full-screen mode, to compose an e-mail and get back to the e-mails list with the Compose window neatly tucked away at the bottom of the screen.

Additionally, if you start composing another e-mail, it will be added as another tab in the Compose window, and you'll be able to easily switch between all the e-mails you're working on using the tab bar.

Mail tabs while composing in full-screen
Mail tabs while composing in full-screen

Safari

In El Capitan, Safari has also received some new features that make it more useful for both power users and beginners that needed more, perhaps enough to make them switch back from Mozilla's Firefox or from Google's Chrome.

The Safari version available in El Capitan adds pinned websites, a feature included in other browsers a long time ago and a much-needed improvement to the way tabs are managed within Apple's web browser.

Safari now also allows you to effortlessly stream video content to your Apple TV via the newly added AirPlay support.

Another quite useful and long-awaited feature now allows El Capitan users to mute the sound in background tabs. To make things even better, Safari will also show you exactly which tab auto-started playing video or audio content without your permission.

Apple's Safari browser also comes with a newly restyled status bar, with a new translucent look, that disappears automatically when your mouse's pointer does not hover over a hyperlink.

Muting tabs in Safari
Muting tabs in Safari

Maps

The Apple Maps application has also received its improvements, as it is now capable of displaying public transit information just like its iOS 9 counterpart.

Don't get your hopes up though because, as was the case with the iOS 9 Maps application, this feature will be available only in a number of select cities, with others to be added later on.

The new Maps app in El Capitan will also allow you to plan routes using your Mac and then send the stop-by-stop directions to your iPhone for simple navigation while on the go.

The Maps app on OS X El Capitan
The Maps app on OS X El Capitan

Notes

Notes has also been revamped in El Capitan, just like the Notes app in iOS 9 with added text processing features, the capability of adding videos and photos in notes, your own sketches, as well as map locations and to-do lists.

Moreover, your notes are now synced using iCloud instead of the IMAP sync engine used before, which means that they will be protected using iCloud's end-to-end encryption.

The Notes app
The Notes app

Spotlight

The old Spotlight you knew is now a lot smarter in OS X El Capitan, as it can understand natural language which means you will be able to ask it to find the documents you've created on any given day, and it will find and display them for you in an instant.

In addition, you can now get quicker access to various types of information such as weather, news and stocks info right from within Spotlight's window, eliminating the need to open a web browser.

The Spotlight search field can now also be moved around the screen and this makes it easy to place it exactly where you need, as out of your way or in your face as you want it to be.

If you need more space for viewing the results Spotlight finds when searching your Mac, its window is also resizable, making a lot simpler to get as much information about what you’re searching in one big gulp.

El Capitan's smarter Spotlight
El Capitan's smarter Spotlight

Photos

Apple has also improved the Photos application in El Capitan by adding some iPhoto features you've been missing like album sorting, editing photo location and face recognition.

Furthermore, the Photos application now offers support for extensions that will allow third-party developers to add extra features to help end-users make the most out of their photo collection.

Editing images in Photos
Editing images in Photos

Disk Utility

Apple's disk management utility is one of the only apps in OS X El Capitan that has received a complete overhaul of the user interface, with an interface that makes it easy to see what types of files take up the most space on your Mac's hard drives (like the one used in iTunes to display the free space on your iOS device).

Also, the Disk Utility app no longer allows you to fix permissions, a procedure that according Apple was now no longer necessary seeing that all the files and folders previously affected by permission changes are now protected by the El Capitan's System Integrity Protection feature.

The new Disk Utility app in El Capitan
The new Disk Utility app in El Capitan

Mission Control

The Mission Control app has also received a quick polish, with all the app windows being displayed just like they were by its older cousin, the Exposé.

Spaces

While activating Mission Control, you can see that the Spaces bar in El Capitan is now a lot slimmer and features only the names of your Spaces, with no preview thumbnails.

If you need to get a quick glimpse at what windows are in each Space, you just have to move the mouse pointer over the Spaces bar, and you will also be able to add new spaces by clicking on the Plus button on the right side, as well as remove the ones you no longer need by clicking on the X mark next to the thumbnail when you hover the pointer over each space.

Spaces in El Capitan
Spaces in El Capitan

Progress indicator for iCloud Drive transfers

While using the Finder and adding new files to the iCloud Drive folder, you will now be able to see a pie-chart-like transfer progress indicator allowing you to monitor it while working on other tasks.

Moreover, while Apple did not provide a way for users to keep an eye on iCloud Drive's uploads before, you will now be able to know exactly when a backup has finished.

Progress indicator for iCloud Drive transfers
Progress indicator for iCloud Drive transfers

Miscellaneous improvements

First of all, Apple has increased the amount of VRAM available on Macs running El Capitan up to 1.5 GB for some Macs and this might prove a useful addition if you'll ever use your Mac to play games or with a 4K display.

The contextual menu has also been slightly revamped with the addition of a "Rename" entry that will appear each time you right-click on a file or folder on your Mac's desktop or in a Finder window.

In OS X El Capitan, Apple has also added native TRIM support for third-party solid state drives which means that applications that enabled TRIM for unsupported SSDs will no longer be needed.

Mission Control and Spaces in El Capitan
Mission Control and Spaces in El Capitan

The so-called "spinning beachball of death" has also been restyled in OS X 10.11 and, from my experience while using El Capitan on both test Macs, you will most definitely see it at least once per day.

This is because, even though apps are faster in El Capitan and freeze less often when compared to Yosemite, you'll still be presented with the occasional beachball while launching some third-party applications.

As I've been able to notice, this happened only when starting applications that haven't been updated in at least a year, so this issue might be attributed to their lack of El Capitan optimization.

COMPATIBILITY

It runs on all the Macs compatible with OS X Yosemite, so if you’re already running OS X 10.10 Yosemite on your Mac, you just have to upgrade to OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

However, to make sure that we're on the same page, we’ve also included a list of all Mac models compatible with El Capitan, for later reference, and as you can probably see, the list of supported Macs has remained the same since the release of Mac OS X Mountain Lion.  

iMac Mid 2007 or newer
MacBook Air Late 2008 or newer
MacBook Aluminum Late 2008; Early 2009 or newer
MacBook Pro 13-inch, Mid 2009 or newer; 15-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or newer; 17-inch, Late 2007 or newer
Mac Mini Early 2009 or newer
Mac Pro Early 2008 or newer
Xserve Early 2009

CONCLUSION

As I said at the beginning of the review, I tested OS X 10.11 El Capitan on a Mac Pro and an iMac Mid 2007 to be able to better differentiate how the new OS X release would run on both one of the toughest and most resilient Macs ever released by Apple and on the oldest possible device you can install it on.

After using it since the first released developer beta, I can say that Macs OS X El Capitan worked perfectly on both, with the only observable differences appearing when I used processor intensive applications. In those cases, the dual core iMac showed its age because, even though it had 6GB of RAM instead of the 4 GB it came with, the CPU load was nearing 100%.

The important thing though is that the iMac never froze, and I haven’t experienced any forced shutdowns or kernel panics even when it had no more CPU and RAM resources left to spare.

However, as is the case with any operating system, I’ve also had the chance to notice a number of problems which, fortunately, should be easy to fix in the next OS X 10.11.1 release, which was already released as a beta.

First of all, I experienced some delays at random times, mostly on the iMac, when activating the menu bar by moving the mouse pointer at the top of the screen when it was set to auto-hide.

Also, once in a while Spotlight displayed an empty result window when I typed the search terms and immediately hit the down arrow to go through them. Despite that, I learned that if you leave it enough time to display them at its leisure, it works 100% of the time.

Third-party apps not starting became a thing to expect when the System Integrity Protection was enabled, especially if the apps weren’t updated at least once since the release of the first El Capitan beta. If this is also your case, disable System Integrity Protection and most of the apps will work again without problems.

Also, the spinning beachballs of death have shown themselves a few times, but as far as I’ve been able to tell, it only happens when launching third-party apps that haven’t been optimized to run on El Capitan.

On the whole, once you update your Mac to OS X El Capitan, you’ll see that the new OS looks the same but it doesn’t quite feel the same as OS X Yosemite. This is because Apple kept its promise to make it snappier and, according to my experience, left 99% of the OS visuals untouched, with an occasional touch of the brush where OS X really needed a new coat of paint.

To sum my experience with El Capitan since the first developer beta until now, I’d have to say that installing it felt more like updating an app to a new and better version and less like updating the entire operating system. Of course, like any other update, it does come with its bugs and issues, but none of them are a deal breaker.

If you’re still on the fence about updating to Apple’s OS X El Capitan, think about it this way: would you want your Mac to be better? If the answer is yes, then you know what to do.

El capitan screenshots (25 Images)

The OS X El Capitan desktop
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