10.11 impressions on a six year old MacBook

[WalnutSpice]

Here are my own first impressions of El Capitan on my six year old early 2009 white MacBook.
Specs

2.0GHz Core 2 Duo / 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM / NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256MB / 240GB PNY SSD

The first thing I noticed is it runs very very smooth. I ran Yosemite on here before and it was just so jittery and laggy I had to go back to Mavericks. It took ages for things to open, Safari was unstable and web pages had issues loading. El Capitan is just very smooth. I can tell Apple tested 10.11 on every Mac it supports and made sure it was optimized for the video card / chipset. But of corse it is a beta so I have run into a few issues. I get an error using Java applications saying it requires at least Java 1.6 which El Capitan does have but it just doesn't work. Yosemite also had this issue in it's beta stages though. Another problem I've had is broken apps. Menu Meters was the worst as it doesn't work at all. Other apps will still work but will be sort of unstable. For instance I can't have iTunes and Spotify open at once or Spotify will lose it's ****. In some other apps I've had freezes but never has an app not recovered from a freeze. Another small issue I've noticed is iTunes and Photos will not sync my iPhone 5s, but Mavericks has no issue syncing it on iTunes 12 and iPhoto '09.
So other than the basic beta issues, it's exactly what Yosemite should've been. Better battery life, faster overall performance and a snappy UI that doesn't lag. I would highly recommend El Capitan to anyone with an older Mac such as mine when it's finally released.

-Edit
I've been playing with some new features and I have to say, I love the new version of Safari with the pinned tabs and Spotlight is actually more useful than I thought. Only two things I ~hate~ is I have to modify the Safari version number to 7.5.6 because 8.1 forces HTML 5 in YouTube. HTML 5 YouTube on my MacBook is awful. HTML 5 YouTube in general is awful. It forces 60FPS which slows down performance and most of the time it caps a video at 480p. Flash Player is still the best method for YouTube, YouTube is just not ready for HTML 5. But then again it wasn't ready for Google Plus either. Only other thing I dislike (Don't hate, just somewhat dislike) is the Photos app. On iPhoto I was able to simply select my iPhone and import the Pictures / Videos I selected. Now Photos can't interact with my iPhone at all. The photos on my iPhone just get uploaded to my photo stream and then Photos downloads pictures from there which takes for ever and that leaves me with no way to sync my Videos to my Mac without going back to Mavericks to use iPhoto '09 or going through iFunBox (which crashes most of the time when pulling video from an iPhone 4S running iOS 7 or above).
Other than that I have had a way better experience on this MacBook over Yosemite and Mavericks. I'll post some pictures showing bench mark scores on 10.9 vs 10.11 sometime soon. In the end though, Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard is still the fastest OS I've used on this laptop.

 

[navaira]

For instance I can't have iTunes and Spotify open at once or Spotify will lose it's ****.

I think that might be a feature

 

[Paradoxally]

Spotify's app just sucks. Things went downhill a lot after 1.0.

 

[bbfc]

I think that might be a feature

This happens to me. I'm using the Spotify Desktop Beta, so it might be related to that, or it's an issue with OS X.

 

[Apoxual]

This happens to me. I'm using the Spotify Desktop Beta, so it might be related to that, or it's an issue with OS X.

I'm using the production ring app and it loses it's crap whenever I leave Spotify as the active window.

 

[anp27]

I've uninstalled and unsubscribed from Spotify and have completely migrated over to Apple Music. That's one less app to have installed on my Mac and it's so much more streamlined now.

 

[Shirasaki]

I've uninstalled and unsubscribed from Spotify and have completely migrated over to Apple Music. That's one less app to have installed on my Mac and it's so much more streamlined now.

Before you presumably meet with any bugs, you could play happily.

 

[Razer(x)]

Just use the web version of Spotify via Safari

 

[WalnutSpice]

Just use the web version of Spotify via Safari

I also use PowerPC Macs. I do have a modified version of Flash and Safari that gets the Spotify web player to work but the desktop app is just so much faster.

 

[WalnutSpice]

Spotify's app just sucks. Things went downhill a lot after 1.0.

Yeah, on my MacBook running either Mavericks or El Capitan I run into freezes and crashes (More so on El Capitan) but on the older Spotify client on my PowerBook G4 and PowerMac G5 I almost never run into crashes or anything bad. Sucks how a lot of features on the old clients don't work anymore though.

 

[bbfc]

Yeah, on my MacBook running either Mavericks or El Capitan I run into freezes and crashes (More so on El Capitan) but on the older Spotify client on my PowerBook G4 and PowerMac G5 I almost never run into crashes or anything bad. Sucks how a lot of features on the old clients don't work anymore though.

It annoys me (and others if you look on the Spotify community boards) that you can no longer sync or even play local tracks. They seem to be in no hurry to fix it.

 

[kwokaaron]

Just use the web version of Spotify via Safari

One thing I don't like about the web version is how it uses flash.

 

[Erdbeertorte]

Since I replaced the HDD with an SDD and upgraded the RAM to 4 GB it runs perfect.

 

[KALLT]

Flash Player is still the best method for YouTube, YouTube is just not ready for HTML 5.

HTML5 video is fine, the rendering is done by the browser itself, not YouTube. I think you just have to accept that you are running on old hardware and that not everything will work properly anymore. Watching videos in 1080p at 60 FPS will not work smoothly on that hardware even when you download the video and watch it in QuickTime. The benefit of using Flash lies in a reduction of the framerate to 30 FPS.

 

[KALLT]

I've uninstalled and unsubscribed from Spotify and have completely migrated over to Apple Music. That's one less app to have installed on my Mac and it's so much more streamlined now.

Me too. The thing I disliked most about the Spotify app is the break with OS X design conventions, like an automated installer that doesn't tell you what it does, automatic launching by default, stiff scrolling, custom UI components (e.g. the scroll bars). Deezer launched their own app now and they make exactly the same mistakes, perhaps even worse (they insist on leaving cache files in the Music folder). I really dislike apps that don't play by the rules. I couldn't help but to think that the Spotify app must be loaded with crappy ads code throughout, even if you use the premium version. Just checking Little Snitch reveals a lot of external connections. Why would you want something like that? I also didn't like the UI of Spotify itself, it was severely dumbed down over the years. iTunes was always a much more powerful app that allowed you to use your music library how you wanted it, not just by playlists or 'liking' songs.

Deleting my Spotify account was also annoying. I just wanted to change my e-mail address to a disposable e-mail address, but the account management site is utterly broken. In the end I had to go through their customer service and for that it created a separate account with their Spotify Community. I really hate services like that. At least Deezer offered a simple 'delete account' button in my account settings. Knowing all of this I won't be going back anytime soon. Apple Music only needs to run decent, that's all it has to be for me.

 

[anp27]

Me too. The thing I disliked most about the Spotify app is the break with OS X design conventions, like an automated installer that doesn't tell you what it does, automatic launching by default, stiff scrolling, custom UI components (e.g. the scroll bars). Deezer launched their own app now and they make exactly the same mistakes, perhaps even worse (they insist on leaving cache files in the Music folder). I really dislike apps that don't play by the rules. I couldn't help but to think that the Spotify app must be loaded with crappy ads code throughout, even if you use the premium version. Just checking Little Snitch reveals a lot of external connections. Why would you want something like that? I also didn't like the UI of Spotify itself, it was severely dumbed down over the years. iTunes was always a much more powerful app that allowed you to use your music library how you wanted it, not just by playlists or 'liking' songs.

Deleting my Spotify account was also annoying. I just wanted to change my e-mail address to a disposable e-mail address, but the account management site is utterly broken. In the end I had to go through their customer service and for that it created a separate account with their Spotify Community. I really hate services like that. At least Deezer offered a simple 'delete account' button in my account settings. Knowing all of this I won't be going back anytime soon. Apple Music only needs to run decent, that's all it has to be for me.

I use a 128GB SSD as my system drive so I'm always looking for ways to keep my drive lean. I use all native OSX apps (Safari, Mail, Calendar, etc) and they are more than good enough for me. I hope the Notes apps gets as good as Evernote someday so I can stop using EV too. At the moment it is quite indespensible for me because of the Notebook sharing feature. Hope we'll see something similar in the near future and I won't have to subscribe to EV anymore.

 

[WalnutSpice]

View attachment 566437

Since I replaced the HDD with an SDD an upgraded the RAM to 4 GB it runs perfect.

Same. When I had the original HDD in here Yosemite ran awful.

 

[redheeler]

Here are my own first impressions of El Capitan on my six year old early 2009 white MacBook.
Specs

2.0GHz Core 2 Duo / 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM / NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256MB / 240GB PNY SSD

The first thing I noticed is it runs very very smooth. I ran Yosemite on here before and it was just so jittery and laggy I had to go back to Mavericks. It took ages for things to open, Safari was unstable and web pages had issues loading. El Capitan is just very smooth. I can tell Apple tested 10.11 on every Mac it supports and made sure it was optimized for the video card / chipset. But of corse it is a beta so I have run into a few issues. I get an error using Java applications saying it requires at least Java 1.6 which El Capitan does have but it just doesn't work. Yosemite also had this issue in it's beta stages though. Another problem I've had is broken apps. Menu Meters was the worst as it doesn't work at all. Other apps will still work but will be sort of unstable. For instance I can't have iTunes and Spotify open at once or Spotify will lose it's ****. In some other apps I've had freezes but never has an app not recovered from a freeze. Another small issue I've noticed is iTunes and Photos will not sync my iPhone 5s, but Mavericks has no issue syncing it on iTunes 12 and iPhoto '09.
So other than the basic beta issues, it's exactly what Yosemite should've been. Better battery life, faster overall performance and a snappy UI that doesn't lag. I would highly recommend El Capitan to anyone with an older Mac such as mine when it's finally released.

10.11 is definitely an improvement over Yosemite on my SSD-upgraded late 2008 MacBook Air 1.6 as well. The animations are smoother and apps open quicker. It encourages me to send a little less time in Snow Leopard on here