The IT Nerd

Yesterday, Apple released the eleventh version of OS X to the world. Dubbed OS X El Capitan, it is focused on under the hood improvements for the most part while only bringing a handful of new features to the table. That’s good, because last year’s effort which was dubbed OS X Yosemite was a bit of a disaster for Apple as many users had issues with core functionality including WiFi and Bluetooth.

Installing Apple’s latest OS is really simple. Assuming that you prepared for the upgrade beforehand, all you need to do is go to the App Store and download a free installer that’s just over 6GB in size. One note, if you’re running an older version of OS X you don’t need to do interim upgrades. You can go straight to El Capitan from Snow Leopard or later. Once you do that you run it and it after a handful of clicks, you should go find something to do for the next 30 to 60 minutes depending on how fast your computer is. It really doesn’t require user intervention for the most part. But that appears to depend on your hardware or how the system that you’re upgrading from is set up. I say that because I installed it on my brand new MacBook Pro With Retina Display and it just sailed through with no user intervention required. I then installed it on my wife’s MacBook Pro which is a mid 2012 model without a retina display and that required my wife to go through the setup wizard for iCloud again. I have no explanation as to why there was a difference. But in either case, the install is painless and you’ll have El Capitan installed before you know it.

Now one thing that I should note is that some users will run Apple’s Disk Utility after the install to make sure that everything is fine. I have to admit that I have done that for years. Those who do this will notice that they no longer have the ability to do a permissions repair. That may freak you out, but it shouldn’t. One of the new features in El Capitan is System Integrity Protection (SIP) which is also known as rootless mode. The purpose of SIP is that it will prevent the modification or removal of certain system files among other changes (like changing permissions for example) by locking more of the core system down. This is good because it adds another hurdle to any malware that wants to do bad things to your Mac. It also makes permission repairs irrelevant.

So, with the install out of the way, The next thing to do is to focus on the technical changes in OS X. That will be in part two of this review which will be posted tomorrow.

This entry was posted on October 1, 2015 at 9:26 am and is filed under Products with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.