Apple OS X El Capitan Review

With the release of OS X 10.11 El Capitan, the latest version of Cupertino's desktop-and-laptop OS, the Apple ecosystem gets tighter than ever. A few years ago, Apple's phone-and-tablet operating system, iOS, was always a few months out of sync with OS X, so the features on your phone never entirely matched the features on your Mac. This time around, Apple has released OS X El Capitan only two weeks after iOS 9, and the operating systems are more tightly connected than ever before.

Both new versions show Apple at its best—again upgrading its operating systems in a way that adds worthwhile new power without making users stumble over a steep learning curve. OS X El Capitan looks subtly different from its predecessor, Yosemite, but everything you know about using Yosemite still works in El Capitan—except that El Capitan is refreshingly faster in everything it does. If you have almost any Mac made in the past five years or so, the App Store will offer to update your system to El Capitan at no charge. You should almost certainly accept that offer.

Now that Windows 10 has arrived, OS X finally has a serious rival for the title of world's best desktop-laptop operating system, but OS X is still in the lead. El Capitan improves on Yosemite's already-strong coherence and integration. All the built-in apps look and work in similar ways, and with easy automatic exchange of data between, for example, mail messages and the calendar. Windows 10 offers a confusing mix of up-to-date tablet style and traditional desktop-style interfaces. Apple hasn't wavered in its commitment to separate OSes for traditional keyboard-and-trackpad-or-mouse machines and for touchscreen tablets and phones. Microsoft offers a single OS for all platforms that, to me at least, still doesn't feel entirely at home on touchscreen devices. El Capitan and iOS 9 share closely similar features, but each is optimized for its own interface, and together they seem to me to confirm that Apple still has it right. Microsoft, despite the great advances in Windows 10, still hasn't mastered the problem of writing one OS for multiple platforms.

Spotlight on Spotlight
The most-obvious new feature in El Capitan is the expanded Spotlight search, which works a lot like a text-based counterpart to iOS's Siri. You can now ask it for movie times, nearby restaurants, weather forecasts, documents you created in the past week, messages from anyone you name, and much more. The most-visible change in the new version is the system font, an Apple-developed font called San Francisco (no relation to the ransom-note-style San Francisco font in 1980s-era Macs) that's now the text font for OS X, iOS, and watchOS used on the Apple Watch.

Window Management Enhancements
Other striking new visual features include Split View, which is a lot like the new split- screen feature that iOS 9 supports on select iPads. You can launch this feature in different ways. For example, in Mission Control, you do so by dragging the icon of one full-screen app over the icon of another full-screen app. But the easiest way is to click and hold the full-screen button on the toolbar of one app and drag it to the left or right half of the screen. Then click on one of the windows on the other side of the screen to make it fill the other half. You can drag the border between the two halves to resize the two panes, and you can tell which app is active by looking at the toolbar at the top of each—the active app has a darker toolbar, the inactive one is grayed out.

You also get a new way to switch an app to full-screen mode, in addition to clicking on the little double-arrow icon on the left end of the menu bar: simply drag the window to the top of the screen and wait for the Mission Control toolbar to appear, with a plus sign icon on to which you drag the window. The result is that the window switches to full screen. I had to experiment with this before I got the timing right—you need to drag decisively but not frantically if you want the toolbar to open for you. Mission Control itself is easier to get to via a new four-finger upward swipe gesture.

Other subtle changes in the interface include an option that automatically hides the top-line menu until you move the cursor to the top of the screen—a feature that matches the long-standing option to show or hide the Dock. Also, Command-Option-Delete opens a dialog that lets you permanently delete a file, without moving it to the Trash—matching Windows' long-standing Shift-Delete keystroke that does the same thing. And if you can't find your cursor, swipe back and forth quickly on the trackpad, and the cursor will briefly grow huge so you can see it. That's a small change, but a welcome one.

Notable Notes
The Notes app gets its biggest overhaul ever, bringing it almost in line with Evernote and Microsoft's OneNote. You can now use the Export button in Safari and other apps to send thumbnails or links directly to Notes. Select a few lines of text in Notes, click the font button on the toolbar, and a dropdown menu lets you convert the text into bulleted, numbered, or dashed lists. Perhaps the niftiest feature is another toolbar button that lets you convert a list into a checklist, with open circles that you can transform into a checkmark by clicking on them.

Apple updated its Photos app for Yosemite users a few months ago, and the spacious new interface won't hold any surprises for El Capitan users. But El Capitan adds an Attachments Browser to its Notes app that makes it easy to find photos, videos or anything else that you want to track down in your notes without scrolling through each note until you find it.

Safari
Safari received a major interface overhaul in Yosemite; the changes in El Capitan are more subtle. You can Control-click on a tab to bring up an option that pins an icon for the current page to the left of the tab bar—an especially useful feature for anyone who doesn't use the Favorites bar, which is turned off by default. Taking a cue from a hidden feature in Chrome, Safari adds a drop-down menu that lets you mute one or all tabs that are playing sound. The Reader feature gets a font and layout dropdown menu that lets you choose among different fonts and light and dark backgrounds. In Yosemite, you could only reduce or enlarge the font size.

Mail and Maps
Mail gets more tightly integrated into the rest of the OS, so messages that include phone numbers or dates display with a toolbar that lets you click a button to add the number to Contacts and the date to Calendar. OS X Mail also adds support for gestures familiar from iOS Mail, for example swiping right on a mail message to mark it as read or unread, swiping left to delete it.

As in iOS 9, Maps gets transit information for a few major cities, though Google Maps is still far in the lead in transit data, at least in American and European cities. If you want to find a bus route in Edinburgh, for example, Apple Maps won't help you but Google will. On the other hand, the menu that pops up when you click on a subway station in Apple Maps has more information about connecting routes and train schedules than Google Maps offers, and presents it in a more convenient way—for example, showing that the next train will arrive in two minutes, not at 11:31.

Apple's map data keeps improving, and I noticed that some problems have been fixed where some rural streets appeared in different places on the map and on the satellite image. There are still occasional glitches, for example, when two towns share the same zip code, an address shown on a pin sometimes lists the wrong town, even though you typed the correct town into the search bar.

Pedal to the Metal
Behind the scenes, Apple claims to have improved performance, and the results are obvious. Everything starts faster and runs faster. Mail messages download more quickly, thanks to newly applied intelligence that downloads text first and other elements afterward, so you can start reading immediately. Apple also claims major improvements in Chinese and Japanese input methods, but I haven't tested these.

Small Issues
For almost every Mac user, El Capitan will be an update worth having, and, after four months of beta testing by a million volunteers for the public preview, El Capitan feels solid and reliable. I think it always makes sense to wait a few days before upgrading after a first release, in case some unexpected problem suddenly turns up, but I don't think it's worth waiting more than that. I found only two issues that might make me hold off on the upgrade, but I doubt that either issue will affect more than a few users. Both are the result of new security settings in El Capitan, and I can't complain about enhanced security. Even so, I wish I could work around these two issues.

The first issue involves the blindingly blue default folder icon that Apple introduced in Yosemite. I like to place folders on the desktop, and under Yosemite, I could change the default folder icon into something less attention-grabbing by pasting a pre-Yosemite folder icon into a folder's Get Info box, or by using an ingenious free utility called LiteIcon. New security features in El Capitan prevent LiteIcon from changing default folder icons, and the old paste-into-Get-Info method doesn't work either. The only workaround I know is to create my desktop folders somewhere else, create aliases for them with slightly different names, and paste a non-blinding icon into the aliases' Get Info boxes. It's clumsy, but it's better than staring at those bright blue folders.

The second issue involves the popular Wineskin freeware that makes it easy to package many Windows apps so that they run in an OS X window (wineskin.urgesoftware.com). Under El Capitan, my old Wineskin-wrapped apps won't open. I can only hope that it's possible to fix this, but I haven't seen a solution yet.

Still the Best
Both of these are minor annoyances that will affect a tiny minority of users. For everyone else, OS X El Capitan is the latest and best of Apple's long series of incremental updates that work better, look better, and fit smoothly into the Apple ecosystem. Many Windows users won't be tempted by it, especially those who enjoy the speed and convenience of Windows 10, and anyone who works with high-tech scientific and legacy apps with no close counterparts under OS X—for example, financial offices that use Windows-only information services, and legal offices that still use WordPerfect. Others who won't be swayed will include anyone who prefers Windows' more extensive keyboard support to Apple's preference for gestures and trackpads. I use both OS X and Windows every day, but whenever I have a choice, I pick up my Mac. OS X El Capitan shares our Editors' Choice rating with Windows 10, but when I want to use a computer for enjoyment as well as for work, OS X remains my clear first choice.