Instead, it utilizes the little stoplight buttons with a long press, then gives you an Exposé view so you can pick your second app. It's hard not to see it as the analogue to Split View on the iPad - but luckily Apple isn't slavishly copying its other platform. Take Split View, which extends the existing full-screen feature and lets you have two apps side by side. But with El Capitan, Apple's made the learning curve you usually have to climb to become a 'power user' (whatever that is) much more gradual.

Most of it left me nonplussed because all of these things didn't feel new and different to me - I've been finding ways to fix all of those problems for years with third-party apps and add-ons. Spotlight is becoming more than just a simple file search box. El Capitan is a good update, but the most interesting thing about it isn't the features - it's the philosophy behind them.Įl Capitan takes the sorts of things that experts have been doing with third-party apps and utilities for years on the Mac and builds them right into the OS. This is usually the part where I tell you that shrugging would be a mistake, that there's a revolution hidden inside these iterative updates. So easy that I've found myself doing exactly that over the past few weeks. Given all that, it's easy to just shrug at this OS update. Virtually nobody will feel that their Mac experience has fundamentally changed, instead we'll just see it get slightly nicer. Virtually everybody with Yosemite will (and should) update. El Capitan is the small one in Apple's big-then-small OS update cadence, which means that we have just a few core changes, a bunch of app updates, and a healthy pile of bug fixes. It'll be free, and given that Apple claims its predecessor had 'the fastest adoption ever' of any PC OS, it'll be popular too. Starting on September 30th, everybody will be able to install Apple's latest OS X update, El Capitan, on their Macs.

Yosemite mac os el capitan