The IT Nerd

The final part of this review will cover the new user interface and user experience changes in El Capitan and my overall thoughts on Apple’s latest OS. Here’s what is new in El Capitan:

• Split View: This feature makes full-screen mode twice as useful by letting you split your screen between two apps. This might not be useful if you have a MacBook. but if you have a large screen, this will be very useful.
• Mission Control is way more useful than before.
• If you lose the cursor you can shake your mouse or rub your finger quickly on the trackpad and the cursor will get very large so you can see it.
• Spotlight can do a lot more of the things Siri can do on your iPhone. It can find info on stocks, scores, news and a lot more.
• Mail on OS X is now just like Mail on your iDevice. It can allow you to add contact details or event times found in the body of messages to the address book or calendar app. You can also swipe to delete or mark messages as read as well. I can also make messages full screen as well as tabbing replies just like it was a web browser.
• Maps now has transit directions that are sharable with iOS devices and the Apple Watch. But just like iOS 9, what you get or don’t get will depend on where you live as transit directions aren’t yet available everywhere. But like iOS 9, if you get them, you will love it.
• You can hide the menu bar if it annoys you. It doesn’t annoy me, but I know people who find the menu bar annoying.
• In Safari, you can pin your favorite tabs so that you can cut clutter, yet have access to them when required. Plus you can mute tabs that are autoplaying sounds or videos that you can’t stop easily.

So, that doesn’t sound like a huge list of features. It isn’t. Remember that this version of OS X is about under the hood improvements rather than new features. So far it all seems to work. Though one other issue that has cropped up is that Office 2016 has major stability issues on El Capitan and complaints are piling up on the Microsoft forums about this. Microsoft and Apple are working on a fix, but that casts a bit of a negative shadow on El Capitan. So do the issues that I raised in part two this review.

So, should you upgrade? The price is right, performance is a tad better, and the update has no show stopper bugs (at least for me), thus I would say yes. Just make sure that you follow my advice on upgrading and you should be fine.

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.

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.