I'm not comfortable with the level of cloud activity that Apple insists on anymore. Nor am I comfortable with the privacy-reducing features, or the elevated use of biometrics.
- Siri is freaking everywhere. And its all handled off-site on Apple servers. I have a 3.2GHz i5, a terabyte of drive space, and 8GB of ram. Speech recognition was available on 68040 Macs back in the mid 90's. No reason why everything has to be transmitted to a remote server. On a phone maybe, but not on a local desktop with this much horsepower.
- Siri will require a working mic to be on at all times. When I upgrade my drive I'm going to physically remove the camera and mic from my iMac. I'm tired of having an ugly patch blocking a piece of the frame over the display, and I'm tired of having to fight to keep the mic turned off.
- the desktop and documents folders are now automatically uploaded to iCloud. Of course you can turn it off, but how much of it will make it there before you're allowed to do that?
- Optimized storage. This is on by default, and will start moving files the second you're done installing. How nice of them to move all your rarely used files into the cloud. Equally nice that under the Telecommunications Act of 1984, any file over a certain age (I can't remember if its 18 months or 180 days)stored on a remote server, is considered "abandoned", and thereby fair game for the Feds, no warrant necessary.
- Facial recognition in Photos. I'm sure thats real convenient for the user, but its also convenient for prying eyes when the user helpfully identifies everyone they know by name in those photos.
- Apple Music. I have yet to see that they've fixed the whole "we'll helpfully scan your hard drive and move everything music-related to the cloud". Information on what people listen to, when, how often, is extremely valuable and useful to certain people and organizations. I'm not going to contribute to that.
- Apple Pay is on the Mac. Hooray. Except you have to have a fingerprint saved on the iPhone to use it. No way am I ever going to do that.
The only way I'd use this upgrade is if the machine was disconnected from the internet. And you won't be able to use it on a machine disconnected from the net. Have fun trying to just use iTunes on El Capitan with no net connection, now imagine that system wide.
I think that computers have reached the limits of neat new things that are actually useful - at least for now - and they're going to focus on bringing one hundred percent of our lives into the cloud.
.... and for that reason, I'm out.
