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General thoughts on El Capitan compared to Yosemite?

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Noble Actual

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 10, 2014
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To be honest, upgrading to Yosemite was a horrible decision. Liked it for the cleaner look but I don't remember by 13" MBA (2013) being incrediblly slow at everything during Mavericks.

- Booting up is slow (usually have a black bar on the top)

- Restarting lags

- Window sizes are completely random

- Apps (Safari//iBooks, etc) lag a bit

- Ever since Apple Music, iTunes has been slow

- Hand Off / Continuity hasn't really worked or stops working after a while

Been using Windows 10 on another laptop with not as good specs as my MBA and I'm pretty suprised by the smooth experience it offers.

All I want in El Capitan is a more pleasing experience. Would take 3-5 seconds faster everything compared to a ton of new UI and features that just seems to slow the Mac.

Don't want to try out the public beta as I use my MBA for everything.

Just a general consesus. El Capitan better than Yosemite?
 
Noble Actual said:
To be honest, upgrading to Yosemite was a horrible decision. Liked it for the cleaner look but I don't remember by 13" MBA (2013) being incrediblly slow at everything during Mavericks.

- Booting up is slow (usually have a black bar on the top)

- Restarting lags

- Window sizes are completely random

- Apps (Safari//iBooks, etc) lag a bit

- Ever since Apple Music, iTunes has been slow

- Hand Off / Continuity hasn't really worked or stops working after a while

Been using Windows 10 on another laptop with not as good specs as my MBA and I'm pretty suprised by the smooth experience it offers.

All I want in El Capitan is a more pleasing experience. Would take 3-5 seconds faster everything compared to a ton of new UI and features that just seems to slow the Mac.

Don't want to try out the public beta as I use my MBA for everything.

Just a general consesus. El Capitan better than Yosemite?
Click to expand...

For me personally El Cap is already better than Yosemite in 'normal use'. It's as fast as Windows 10. Some of it is still flaky because it's a beta. In six weeks time it is going to be well worth the upgrade.
 
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I'm wondering in the case of Yosemite that it was getting to the end of its life in terms of how things were being done resulting in the sorts of issues that you raised where as with El Capitan the use of Metal has enabled them to clean things up under the hood and address those inefficiencies. What I think is also the most interesting part is the long term development of Metal and whether eventually we'll get to the point that Metal will have the depth and breadth of features that developers want and OS X pretty much has moved completely over to Metal with OpenGL sitting in the background only for backwards compatibility.
 
They're both about the same to me. Performance is good and fast on both and overall, 10.11 has been very stable for being a beta.

10.11 has some minor enhancements and changes, but nothing of a wow factor. Most changes are under-the-hood changes.
 
I've found El Capitan to be the most unstable OS beta Apple has ever released. That being said, when it works, it works extremely well. Most of the bugs are tied to other apps not being updated—which of course will change soon enough.

By the time El Capitan is released, I believe it'll be one of the best OS versions they've released in quite a long time.
 
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I was about to discard my 2011 MBP because it was just about unusable with Yosemite, but with the El Captain beta it's a whole different story, it usually runs super smooth and for simple tasks it is just as fast as my flashy gaming PC.
 
Noble Actual said:
Just a general consesus. El Capitan better than Yosemite?
Click to expand...

I agree with everything you said in your post about Yosemite, was not great. I am very impressed with El Capitan so far after 10 days almost everything is better and much faster / smoother running.

That said, outlook 2011 crashes periodically and I cannot connect outlook to exchange ( could be a deal breaker for some - not for me)

Other than the outlook issue it's been great so far.
 
Noble Actual said:
Just a general consesus. El Capitan better than Yosemite?
Click to expand...

After endless problems with Yosemite I was very sceptical about El Capitan. Based on my testing of Public Beta 3-4 I am cautiously optimistic that 10.11 might be what Yosemite should have been. However I am still very pissed about Yosemite and I will likely wait until 10.11.5 because I don´t want take any changes!
 
I like OS X El Cap, it's not quite as fast as Snow Leopard but after Yosemite any speed improvements are welcome. It's definitely the closest we've had to a Snow Leopard release (although that's obvious, they've done a similar thing with the name).
 
I never really had any complaints about performance in Yosemite. But 10.11 does seem more responsible in certain situations. My biggest criticism of 10.11 is the massively bugged out WiFi implementation for enterprise networks. They appear t have have rewritten the WiFi kernel code from scratch and now it is crashing when attempting to connect to certain networks. Sometimes it works, but then it regularly crashes the WindowServer for some weird reason, which results in major beachballs. Funnily enough, it also shows that Apple has improved the underpinnings of the OS — in this situation, the entire graphical subsystem is crashed, but the OS is able to reboot it without losing any data or state in the open applications. This is fairly impressive!
 
MacGizmo said:
I've found El Capitan to be the most unstable OS beta Apple has ever released.
Click to expand...

My experience has been the opposite. This is the first time I have used a beta as my main OS, and I have used it since the first PB. There were some bugs in the first couple of releases, but, for me, PB3 and PB4 have been relatively trouble free.

Lou
 
It's a beta release and you really can't say much about it yet with any real resolve. Maybe around September but at present it's still not working 100% yet. I wouldn't bet anything on a beta release.

One thing I will say is that the appearance is improved a little. I still don't like it but I can find it sort of tolerable. There are now very slight 3d effects that help, the buttons are outlined clearer so they don't look like some 5 year old did them, and they seem to have adjusted the contrast a little so it doesn't look like it's glaring white everywhere.

….unfortunately, the in-your-face translucency is still present.
 
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