Review: Apple OS X El Capitan – Part 2
In part one we looked at the installation process for El Capitan which was pretty straightforward for the most part. Now in this part of my review, I’m going to look at the under the hood changes to this latest iteration of OS X.
Apple has apparently gone all in with their Metal application programming interface or API that they first brought to you in iOS 8. What is Metal? It’s a core-level graphics technology that allows developers nearly untethered access to system graphics processing unit or GPU hardware for highly efficient processing of visual images. Now the more technical people will say “Wait, doesn’t Apple have that already in the the form of the OpenGL API that is cross platform?” Well, yes it’s still there. But because it doesn’t have direct access to the hardware like Metal does, it’s not even close in terms of performance. Clearly Apple is angling to do two things. First is you can write your apps for iOS and with minimal work port them over to OS X (or vice versa). But second, though they have not said this, they’re likely pitching this as a replacement for OpenGL. We’ll see what happens with that as I am not convinced that it’s going to happen. Be that as it may, Apple went a step further. Core Animation and Core Graphics which are two other Apple graphic related APIs which have been around forever are now based on Metal.
What does that mean to you? Faster graphics and the like for your apps. I can say that switching between one app or another feels a touch smoother. Messages in the Mail client load up a touch faster. The differences are not dramatic, but they are there. But they do make me question the claims of 50 percent faster graphics rendering and 40 percent efficiency improvements. Though I will say that if the Adobe and like jump onto the Metal bandwagon, you should notice a significant performance increase in your day to day tasks. Even if they don’t, you should see some sort of speed boost, though not as dramatic.
What’s the catch? You need at least a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air from mid-2012, a late-2012 iMac, a late-2012 Mac mini or a late-2013 Mac Pro (or newer) to make all of this work. So if you don’t have anything on this list or newer, sorry, you’re out of luck.
Some other technical notes:
- Boot Camp now natively supports Windows 10
- The battery improvements from OS X Yosemite are also here in El Capitan, so you should expect the same battery life as before.
- 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. The catch is that apps may need tweaking to work with SIP. Thus you may find that some of your apps stop working after the upgrade unless you’ve taken the time to verify compatibility beforehand. You can turn this feature off, but take it from me. Don’t do it. Leave it on as a means to protect yourself.
In terms of showstopper bugs, I’m only aware of two common ones. There are some who can’t connect to Synology network storage after the El Capitan upgrade, and lost mail accounts after the upgrade. I’m not hearing about problems using WiFi or problems with Bluetooth or anything that plagued OS X Yosemite when it was released. Neither of which of which I tripped over with either Mac that I updated. So I’m thinking that Apple did a much better job getting El Capitan out the door.
As for other observations, both Macs do seem to be faster than before. It is noticeable, but not dramatic. Seeing as this is a free upgrade, I’ll take that.
I’ll wrap things up in part three of this review with the user interface and user experience changes in El Capitan and my overall thoughts on Apple’s latest OS.
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