OS X El Capitan Reviews: 'Solid as a Rock' and a Worthy Update Thanks to Performance Improvements

[Toltepeceno]

Performance will be better compared to a turd like Yosemite, but I bet it's way behind Snow Leopard or even Mountain Lion.

It will be better because after a year of us beta testing yosemite the final release is coming as el capitan. I wish they would just go to a 2 year rotation instead of a year of calling public beta testing a release.

I'm on a mid 2010 Mac mini 4gb ram running yosemite and it's awful. Like, really almost unusable, it takes forever to start. It takes about 3 minutes for safari to open. Even longer for iTunes.

. I haven't been following news on El capitan but does anyone know if it will be better than yosemite?

I've seen loads of posts online with people having the same problem as me.

Do you have a spinner or ssd? My mac mini was unusable with yosemite until I put an ssd in it, yosemite is horrible with ssd's and I doubt el cap will be going the other direction. With ssd it's like a whole new computer.

 

[\-V-/]

Can we talk about this El Capitan wallpaper which is by far the most depressing stock wallpaper they ever used!

So ... change it.

 

[addictive]

I'm using Mavericks which has performed most reliably for me. I am using a Macbook (aluminium) from 2008 with a SSD and 8GB RAM. Last year i upgraded to Yosemite but after a few weeks or poor performance I went back with my Time Machine to Mavericks and have stuck with Mavericks. I'm not really sure whether it is worth it to me to upgrade for the new features. I like the latest and greatest stuff for OSX but I treasure reliable performance and stability more. Please advise.

 

[NMBob]

I'm debating upgrading. I'm still on Mavericks but it's starting to become outdated (Mavericks and iOS 9 don't sync completely with iCloud). I was on Yosemite for a few days but it was just slow, laggy and overheated my computer constantly.

I have the GM on a 27" Mid-2010 iMac and it seems snappier (sorry), but there are a few skips and sputters here and there. Like when you send an email and it does the zoom off the top of the display it kind of jerks its way to the top of the display (with nothing else going on). Either the coefficients or constants have changed for iStat Menus or it does look like it is running about 10-15 degrees (F) cooler. It idles around 99F/75W, instead of around 110-115F like it was with Yosemite. Haven't had any crashes or burns since using it.

 

[OllyW]

What midi keyboard do you have ?

A Nektar Panorama.

 

[chimpboy74]

Do you have a spinner or ssd? My mac mini was unusable with yosemite until I put an ssd in it, yosemite is horrible with ssd's and I doubt el cap will be going the other direction. With ssd it's like a whole new computer.

No ssd. But prepared to try anything. It's that or throw the thing at the wall.

 

[NMBob]

Performance will be better compared to a turd like Yosemite, but I bet it's way behind Snow Leopard or even Mountain Lion.

Yup. I get to use a SL black plastic MacBook Pro for testing stuff once in a while, and it's so fast compared to anything since...and that's of course, with an old, slow processor. It's a shame.

 

[carrrrrlos]

Looking forward to the Notes app integration from my iPhone to MacBook.

 

[zaquinho17]

Oh man, I remember reinstalling on OS X and losing continuity - frustrating as hell. The problem ended up being something on my iPhone not enabled. While hunting for a solution I realised that it could be one of the many many Continuity/Hand-off options on the phone or Mac that is causing the problem. After a few days of tinkering, formatting, resetting I ended up enabling one option on my iPhone to get it working. On the Mac you really just have to log in to iCloud to get things working (mind you there is a lot that can go wrong on the Mac), but on the iPhone there are a few sub-menus in the Settings app that could be causing you the problem. I don't remember the solution now, but Google is your friend.

PS-Continuity will keep me with Apple no matter what the competition has, I love talking on my Mac and responding to SMS on it...

I began reading and thought you were an amazing person, but then you left me hanging, searching on my own ahaha!

i will wait till wednesday and do the update, if it doesn't com back ill then go on the hunt

 

[ooo]

Elaborate. You mean distortion? Works fine over HDMI here.

The audio goes in and out for me and at times it'll pop. I'm using the 3.5mm audio jack. If you google "el capitan external speakers" a lot of threads will come up regarding it. None of them seemed to fix it.

 

[VulchR]

This time I am waiting before upgrading. The last two times were disasters, taking up a whole day each.

Apple: you guys had better bloody have made the installer more robust. No more of the busted file ownership crap, m'k?

The audio goes in and out for me and at times it'll pop. I'm using the 3.5mm audio jack. If you google "el capitan external speakers" a lot of threads will come up regarding it. None of them seemed to fix it.

Are you sure the pop isn't simply a static discharge - I get that sometimes from the fan forcing hot dry air over the aluminium chassis of my Mac.

 

[iapplelove]

My 2012 MBP classic can't wait for this update!

 

[2010mini]

Does anyone know if I can completely wipe my Mac back to factory. upgrade to El Capitan and then reinstall my files/settings from Time Machine?

If so, how?

 

[Neuro]

So a modest update. And yet good old Parallels are insisting on a full upgrade fee for Parallels Desktop to support the "new features", as per usual...

 

[navaira]

I am not installing El Cap on my partner's iMac because VirtualBox doesn't fully work with 10.11.

I'm very curious, though, whether tomorrow's version will actually be different from the GM. Is it the first time there was only one GM candidate?

 

[jhfenton]

Clearly no one has been testing this with external speakers.

I use external speakers without issues.

 

[Toltepeceno]

No ssd. But prepared to try anything. It's that or throw the thing at the wall.

Trust me. I was in the same position, I was sick of it. I put a samsung 540 evo 256 in it and it went from 26 bounces of the icon for imovie to 2. Not just opening, startup is a few seconds and even running anything is much better. From constant beach ball to no beach ball. This is the single best thing you can do, I am still running 4 memory but will upgrade maybe next month. It's far less important than the ssd. I was ready to toss this, seriously. You won't regret it, like a brand new box. The spinner I moved to the second slot and am using for storage. I seriously went from wanting to go back to windows to staying with osx.

 

[Khemsmtl]

Muting tabs in Safari is the biggest reason I want to upgrade. So due. The amount of times I've opened up a new tab with some autoplay music/video and you have to spend eternity searching for it to mute.

I strongly agree

 

[BigMcGuire]

Trust me. I was in the same position, I was sick of it. I put a samsung 540 evo 256 in it and it went from 26 bounces of the icon for imovie to 2. Not just opening, startup is a few seconds and even running anything is much better. From constant beach ball to no beach ball. This is the single best thing you can do, I am still running 4 memory but will upgrade maybe next month. It's far less important than the ssd. I was ready to toss this, seriously. You won't regret it, like a brand new box. The spinner I moved to the second slot and am using for storage. I seriously went from wanting to go back to windows to staying with osx.

This. I'm running a 500GB Samsung EVO via external USB 3.0 in my Mac Mini 2014 - it's as fast as my Macbook Air.

 

[OS X Dude]

Do not install if you rely on Native Instruments software/hardware.

I got an email from them saying their AUs are not supported in Logic under 10.11.

Basically par for the course with audio work, and Pro Tools users might be able to safely update when 10.12 comes out

 

[HenryDJP]

I hope this ends up being a Snow Leopard type release. Yosemite has been good to me and this sounds even better. Completely forgot it was releasing tomorrow though, haha. As per usual I'll hold back a month or two on my work machine and install it right away on my personal machine.

Eh, blah to Snow Leopard. Tiger was the best version of OS X ever! It was the only version of OS X that was perfect out of the box from launch without any big fix updates. Snow Leopard was crap until 10.6.3.

 

[chimpboy74]

Trust me. I was in the same position, I was sick of it. I put a samsung 540 evo 256 in it and it went from 26 bounces of the icon for imovie to 2. Not just opening, startup is a few seconds and even running anything is much better. From constant beach ball to no beach ball. This is the single best thing you can do, I am still running 4 memory but will upgrade maybe next month. It's far less important than the ssd. I was ready to toss this, seriously. You won't regret it, like a brand new box. The spinner I moved to the second slot and am using for storage. I seriously went from wanting to go back to windows to staying with osx.

Cool. I may give that a go. Is it easy to do? I'm no tech expert but have tinkered with replacing hard drives in Mac books in the past.

 

[busyscott]

All I can think of when I hear "Solid as a rock."

 

[Ebenezum]

I am sceptical how much El Capitan is going to help older Macs with Core 2 Duo processors (2007-2009). Yosemite was intolerable slow and full of bugs on my old iMac. Unfortunately I can't test El Capitan with it until I can repair it.

Since most of the speed improvements are due to Metal which won't work on older Macs my guess is that El Capitan is nowhere as fast as Snow Leopard on older Macs which barely meet requirements...?

I hope Apple stops taking features from iOS, Metal is about only feature which has any practical value to OS X. Maybe Apple keeps updating 10.11 for two years to make it fast and very solid? Yearly updates to OS X are causing way more trouble than they are worth.

 

[busyscott]

All I can think of when I hear "Solid as a rock."