My first impression of El Capitan

[KoolAid-Drink]

I don't know if I'd say I'm impressed. I did a clean install of DP1 on a cMBP (late 2011). A few notes:

a) I hate the new installer. The fact that they've removed the ability to cancel installation or view the log file while installing (by pressing CMD+L, or mousing up to the menu bar) is just silly. Heck, they removed the mouse cursor altogether during installation. What if something went wrong? What would happen then? Or, if the installer was taking unusually long (not unheard of during upgrades), then how would the user be expected to view the log to make sure nothing was stalling the installer? I know the ability to view/save the log file is still there at the very end of installation (when the "completed installation; restarting your computer" dialog appears), but how about during the actual installation itself? It just feels more iOS-like and less Mac-like. It may look slick, but where are the power user features?

b) The San Francisco font looks a bit odd on a non-retina MBP. I liked Helvetica Neue better. In some areas, S.F. looks great, I'll grant it that, but otherwise it looks a bit odd... maybe a bit gaudy. I don't know. Perhaps Apple will tweak this more before release.

c) Speed, etc. seems pretty much on par with Yosemite. Then again, so far, I've not had an issue with Yosemite, unlike many. Yosemite performs very smoothly on my cMBP. Maybe the impact is felt more with rMBP's?

d) Disk Utility definitely is unfinished, especially the partitioning tool. Doesn't work. Hope that's just an oversight.

e) I don't like how they changed the "Macintosh Resources" text in "About My Mac > Support" to "Mac Resources." I may be old-school, but I like seeing the (scant) references to the original Macintosh name scattered around the OS. Reminds me of the legacy and roots of the Macintosh.

f) Can't believe they haven't fixed the bug in Console.app when you resize the window, the next time you launch the app, it launches in the default size. (Try reproducing this by opening console.app, resizing the window by making it either bigger or smaller, then quitting. Relaunch and you'll see the window has popped back to its' default size.) This has existed as a bug since 10.9, and I've done radars on this for 10.9/10.10.

Nothing bad about El Capitan, granted. However, I've always been wary of odd-numbered versions of OS X, because of the pattern I've noticed beginning with 10.4 (good), followed by 10.5 (buggy, bad), 10.6 (very good, refined), 10.7 (incredibly buggy and slow), 10.8 (a refinement of 10.7, improved), 10.9 (sluggish, had weird rendering bugs, TM issues), and 10.10 (smooth, refined). 10.11, unfortunately, falls into the odd-numbered release cycle, so I'll be keeping a careful eye on 10.11 and see how it goes. Hopefully it'll break the odd-numbered pattern.

That's my two cents so far!

 

[TechGod]

I don't know if I'd say I'm impressed. I did a clean install of DP1 on a cMBP (late 2011). A few notes:

a) I hate the new installer. The fact that they've removed the ability to cancel installation or view the log file while installing (by pressing CMD+L, or mousing up to the menu bar) is just silly. Heck, they removed the mouse cursor altogether during installation. What if something went wrong? What would happen then? Or, if the installer was taking unusually long (not unheard of during upgrades), then how would the user be expected to view the log to make sure nothing was stalling the installer? I know the ability to view/save the log file is still there at the very end of installation (when the "completed installation; restarting your computer" dialog appears), but how about during the actual installation itself? It just feels more iOS-like and less Mac-like. It may look slick, but where are the power user features?

b) The San Francisco font looks a bit odd on a non-retina MBP. I liked Helvetica Neue better. In some areas, S.F. looks great, I'll grant it that, but otherwise it looks a bit odd... maybe a bit gaudy. I don't know. Perhaps Apple will tweak this more before release.

c) Speed, etc. seems pretty much on par with Yosemite. Then again, so far, I've not had an issue with Yosemite, unlike many. Yosemite performs very smoothly on my cMBP. Maybe the impact is felt more with rMBP's?

d) Disk Utility definitely is unfinished, especially the partitioning tool. Doesn't work. Hope that's just an oversight.

e) I don't like how they changed the "Macintosh Resources" text in "About My Mac > Support" to "Mac Resources." I may be old-school, but I like seeing the (scant) references to the original Macintosh name scattered around the OS. Reminds me of the legacy and roots of the Macintosh.

f) Can't believe they haven't fixed the bug in Console.app when you resize the window, the next time you launch the app, it launches in the default size. (Try reproducing this by opening console.app, resizing the window by making it either bigger or smaller, then quitting. Relaunch and you'll see the window has popped back to its' default size.) This has existed as a bug since 10.9, and I've done radars on this for 10.9/10.10.

Nothing bad about El Capitan, granted. However, I've always been wary of odd-numbered versions of OS X, because of the pattern I've noticed beginning with 10.4 (good), followed by 10.5 (buggy, bad), 10.6 (very good, refined), 10.7 (incredibly buggy and slow), 10.8 (a refinement of 10.7, improved), 10.9 (sluggish, had weird rendering bugs, TM issues), and 10.10 (smooth, refined). 10.11, unfortunately, falls into the odd-numbered release cycle, so I'll be keeping a careful eye on 10.11 and see how it goes. Hopefully it'll break the odd-numbered pattern.

That's my two cents so far!

Really? 10.10 was absolutely horrendous on my rMBP and my early 2011 MBP. My favourite updates in terms of performance are 10.6, 10.9 and 10.11.

 

[!!!]

I don't know if I'd say I'm impressed. I did a clean install of DP1 on a cMBP (late 2011). A few notes:

a) I hate the new installer. The fact that they've removed the ability to cancel installation or view the log file while installing (by pressing CMD+L, or mousing up to the menu bar) is just silly. Heck, they removed the mouse cursor altogether during installation. What if something went wrong? What would happen then? Or, if the installer was taking unusually long (not unheard of during upgrades), then how would the user be expected to view the log to make sure nothing was stalling the installer? I know the ability to view/save the log file is still there at the very end of installation (when the "completed installation; restarting your computer" dialog appears), but how about during the actual installation itself? It just feels more iOS-like and less Mac-like. It may look slick, but where are the power user features?

b) The San Francisco font looks a bit odd on a non-retina MBP. I liked Helvetica Neue better. In some areas, S.F. looks great, I'll grant it that, but otherwise it looks a bit odd... maybe a bit gaudy. I don't know. Perhaps Apple will tweak this more before release.

c) Speed, etc. seems pretty much on par with Yosemite. Then again, so far, I've not had an issue with Yosemite, unlike many. Yosemite performs very smoothly on my cMBP. Maybe the impact is felt more with rMBP's?

d) Disk Utility definitely is unfinished, especially the partitioning tool. Doesn't work. Hope that's just an oversight.

e) I don't like how they changed the "Macintosh Resources" text in "About My Mac > Support" to "Mac Resources." I may be old-school, but I like seeing the (scant) references to the original Macintosh name scattered around the OS. Reminds me of the legacy and roots of the Macintosh.

f) Can't believe they haven't fixed the bug in Console.app when you resize the window, the next time you launch the app, it launches in the default size. (Try reproducing this by opening console.app, resizing the window by making it either bigger or smaller, then quitting. Relaunch and you'll see the window has popped back to its' default size.) This has existed as a bug since 10.9, and I've done radars on this for 10.9/10.10.

Nothing bad about El Capitan, granted. However, I've always been wary of odd-numbered versions of OS X, because of the pattern I've noticed beginning with 10.4 (good), followed by 10.5 (buggy, bad), 10.6 (very good, refined), 10.7 (incredibly buggy and slow), 10.8 (a refinement of 10.7, improved), 10.9 (sluggish, had weird rendering bugs, TM issues), and 10.10 (smooth, refined). 10.11, unfortunately, falls into the odd-numbered release cycle, so I'll be keeping a careful eye on 10.11 and see how it goes. Hopefully it'll break the odd-numbered pattern.

That's my two cents so far!

D. Disk utility is not yet complete, they said in the release notes that not all features have been introduced.

 

[dogslobber]

I don't know if I'd say I'm impressed. I did a clean install of DP1 on a cMBP (late 2011). A few notes:

e) I don't like how they changed the "Macintosh Resources" text in "About My Mac > Support" to "Mac Resources." I may be old-school, but I like seeing the (scant) references to the original Macintosh name scattered around the OS. Reminds me of the legacy and roots of the Macintosh.

It's only in the last 10 years Macs became usable - with the switch to Intel. Before then the Macintosh was junk. Better to distance the Intel models from the earlier abominations.

 

[leman]

Really? 10.10 was absolutely horrendous on my rMBP and my early 2011 MBP. My favourite updates in terms of performance are 10.6, 10.9 and 10.11.

Performance in 10.10 was very good for me over a range of retina MBPs. Must be some weird configuration glitch. The only area where I noticed some visual lag was Mission Control with many applications open, that seems to have improved tremendously in 10.11. Aside from that, I can't really see any difference in performance between 10.10 and 10.11, both are running very well. Of course, 10.11 has some very annoying bugs at this point, but I guess that is to be expected of a dev preview.

 

[TechGod]

Performance in 10.10 was very good for me over a range of retina MBPs. Must be some weird configuration glitch. The only area where I noticed some visual lag was Mission Control with many applications open, that seems to have improved tremendously in 10.11. Aside from that, I can't really see any difference in performance between 10.10 and 10.11, both are running very well. Of course, 10.11 has some very annoying bugs at this point, but I guess that is to be expected of a dev preview.

Well, I'm not the only one that complained about lag issues with 10.10...

 

[cjmillsnun]

It's only in the last 10 years Macs became usable - with the switch to Intel. Before then the Macintosh was junk. Better to distance the Intel models from the earlier abominations.

Many people on here would disagree with you, myself included. My G4 lasted longer than any of my Intels have so far and was useful up till the end. Macs certainly became more attractive to PC users with the switch to Intel as they could have the fallback of running Windows. But they certainly were not junk in the PPC era.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Nothing bad about El Capitan, granted. However, I've always been wary of odd-numbered versions of OS X, because of the pattern I've noticed beginning with 10.4 (good), followed by 10.5 (buggy, bad), 10.6 (very good, refined), 10.7 (incredibly buggy and slow), 10.8 (a refinement of 10.7, improved), 10.9 (sluggish, had weird rendering bugs, TM issues), and 10.10 (smooth, refined). 10.11, unfortunately, falls into the odd-numbered release cycle, so I'll be keeping a careful eye on 10.11 and see how it goes. Hopefully it'll break the odd-numbered pattern.

You experience is not the same as mine. I agree with you up to Mountain Lion, which sucked on my late 2011 MBP. The GM had serious bugs with HD3000 graphics which caused kernel panics. On all my other machines, 10.9 was fantastic - even from the first DP is was fast and stable. 10.10 has been an extremely buggy and slow release and 10.11 is faster...

 

[SmOgER]

f) Can't believe they haven't fixed the bug in Console.app when you resize the window, the next time you launch the app, it launches in the default size. (Try reproducing this by opening console.app, resizing the window by making it either bigger or smaller, then quitting. Relaunch and you'll see the window has popped back to its' default size.) This has existed as a bug since 10.9, and I've done radars on this for 10.9/10.10.

At least they fixed the popout size when you right click on trash can and then press CMD. That bug was still present in one of the recent Yosemite builds and looked incredibly amateurish.

 

[Taz Mangus]

It's only in the last 10 years Macs became usable - with the switch to Intel. Before then the Macintosh was junk. Better to distance the Intel models from the earlier abominations.

I owned both a G4 and G5 iMac, both worked very well. The G4 lasted 8 years before I sold it. There was nothing junk about those machines.

 

[maflynn]

It's only in the last 10 years Macs became usable - with the switch to Intel. Before then the Macintosh was junk. Better to distance the Intel models from the earlier abominations.

Rubbish, I owned a Mac Se, Bondie Blue iMac, and various other PPC based marks and they were great machines. Just because you didn't like them meant they were abominations.

 

[dogslobber]

Rubbish, I owned a Mac Se, Bondie Blue iMac, and various other PPC based marks and they were great machines. Just because you didn't like them meant they were abominations.

PowerPC struggled with OS X. You can go back through historical evidence to see so. The Mac OS prior to OS X was pretty crap and the early versions of OS X are prior to Panther were used by nobody given the lack of native software and slowness on Power PC. Really by the time Power PC had the muscle to run OS X in a usable manner (i.e. 1Ghz processor) they were EOL'd and Intel was on the horizon. Yes, I ran 10.1.5 on an iMac from turn of the century and it was slow and useless. The alternative was Mac OS 9 which is a poor man's Windows 98.

 

[dogslobber]

I owned both a G4 and G5 iMac, both worked very well. The G4 lasted 8 years before I sold it. There was nothing junk about those machines.

Last G4 I owned was an iBook. Best forgotten. Intel chips made Macs acceptable to mainstream user.

 

[cjmillsnun]

Last G4 I owned was an iBook. Best forgotten. Intel chips made Macs acceptable to mainstream user.

Hmmm, for some people nowadays it will be. "Last Intel Mac I owned was a 2011 MBP... Best forgotten."

I agree that Intel does appeal to the mainstream more, mainly for the reasons I stated before. But one computer does not make a whole processor family junk.

 

[dogslobber]

Sorry, don't mean to come over as pre-intel Mac bashing. I've been a Mac user since 1988.

 

[vista980622]

Really? 10.10 was absolutely horrendous on my rMBP and my early 2011 MBP. My favourite updates in terms of performance are 10.6, 10.9 and 10.11.

On early 2011 cMBP, Yosemite seems fine. But yeah - it's horrible on every rMBP I've used, especially when it's left on without rebooting for a long time.

 

[vista980622]

Performance in 10.10 was very good for me over a range of retina MBPs. Must be some weird configuration glitch. The only area where I noticed some visual lag was Mission Control with many applications open, that seems to have improved tremendously in 10.11. Aside from that, I can't really see any difference in performance between 10.10 and 10.11, both are running very well. Of course, 10.11 has some very annoying bugs at this point, but I guess that is to be expected of a dev preview.

Also scrolling in Finder and PDF preview has been improved tremendously.

 

[vista980622]

You experience is not the same as mine. I agree with you up to Mountain Lion, which sucked on my late 2011 MBP. The GM had serious bugs with HD3000 graphics which caused kernel panics. On all my other machines, 10.9 was fantastic - even from the first DP is was fast and stable. 10.10 has been an extremely buggy and slow release and 10.11 is faster...

10.9 and 10.10 have both been mixed bag for me. 10.9 runs great on MacMini5,1 (2011) but runs very poorly on iMac14,3 (2013). 10.10 reversed the entire situation...

 

[Traverse]

Wow, perceptions differ. I'm not running El Capitan, but you have some users saying it's a night and day performance difference while other's say they don't notice a difference. :/

All I want is bug fixes. There are still glitchy UIs, animations freeze when swiping between desktops, and I get boot errors all the time. You know OS X is in a bad place when you restart and it doesn't come back on.

 

[leman]

All I want is bug fixes. There are still glitchy UIs, animations freeze when swiping between desktops, and I get boot errors all the time. You know OS X is in a bad place when you restart and it doesn't come back on.

Are you getting that in Yosemite? This certainly should not happen. We have dozens of computers running 10.10 by now and there are certainly no severe bugs like you describe.

 

[Traverse]

Are you getting that in Yosemite? This certainly should not happen. We have dozens of computers running 10.10 by now and there are certainly no severe bugs like you describe.

I've only ever had the boot issues with Yosemite and I've had three clean installs. I don't think it's hardware because it never happened on Mavericks.

One issue might be that I keep my computer in clamshell mode with eternal monitors. That's when I have the problem. When it's in clamshell mode and hooked up to two monitors and restart there is a 75% chance it won't come back on. Then I have to get it out of the vertical stand and unhook like 4 wires. Plus, booting it to the native panel messes up my window placement.

Perhaps it's a bug with the dGPU swtiticing (750M)? That's never been entirely smooth on OS X. My next Mac will only have an iGPU.

And when it does come back on, my main external display blinks like crazy until I put in my password for FV encryption and it loads my desktop. Then works fine.

 

[dammerl]

It's only in the last 10 years Macs became usable - with the switch to Intel. Before then the Macintosh was junk. Better to distance the Intel models from the earlier abominations.

If you are speaking of the very early years of OS X you may be right. But if we are speaking of the 90s the only thing that was “junk”, was Windows. OK, it was not complete junk, but anything you did on a Windows computer was working less well than the comparable thing on Mac OS. Windows had the edge only with NT4, IIRC this was around the year 2000. Then —and maybe still in the subsequent early days of OS X— it really was better than Mac OS.

I would say, starting at around the year 2004, Windows very successfully started to regain the merit to be the junk system. (Compared to the evolving OS X.) In that sense i agree with you ;-)

 

[Crisis]

The window size of Terminal.app is not a bug. It's a feature to be compatible with CLI apps that outputs to a fixed size window. You can change it in Preferences -> Profile -> Window.

 

[Jess13]

It's only in the last 10 years Macs became usable - with the switch to Intel. Before then the Macintosh was junk. Better to distance the Intel models from the earlier abominations.

Pure ignorance. My iMac G4 was awesome, I bought it mid-2003. In 2005, I had the best OS of the era (minus gaming) OS X Tiger, with arguably among the best looking computer's Apple has created. While I was happily using my iMac with no problems, my friends were mostly using trash Windows machines with bulky monitors and XP or Vista. "Defragging again. Spamming others with Windows viruses again. Computer won't work because it has virus again." I still have my iMac, though I use MacBook Pro.

You're extremely ignorant.

 

[grahamperrin]

I tried El Capitan for the first time yesterday. I never tried a pre-release, or 10.11.

First impressions

Some of the things that were spoilt by Yosemite have been improved by El Capitan. That's faint praise; it's disgraceful that those things were spoilt.

Some things are less functional.

As far as I can tell, the installer for the OS no longer offers a log during installation (no response to Command-L).

As Apple's approach to human interface guidelines worsened with Yosemite, so now we have inconsistencies and peculiarities in third party applications as well as in Apple applications. For example:

• a progress bar can be used to drag an entire window (without affecting the progress)
• adjacent items can not be used to drag.

… Nothing bad about El Capitan …

Disk Utility can no longer concurrently verify more than one file system or storage system. It appears that fsck_hfs(8) does still support multiple instances, but Disk Utility no longer takes advantage of that support.

Disk Utility no longer offers a log.

Viewing details of e.g. verification in Disk Utility has become more difficult. Insufficient space. Animations in that dialogue are not well-designed.

There's a green tick (check mark) after verification, but that disappears. So if I'm to verify multiple items, Disk Utility no longer helps me to remember which have been verified.

Generally, Disk Utility in El Capitan bears the hallmarks of something that designers have toyed with. Insufficient rigour; insufficient logic; not holistic.

The Console view of DiskUtility.log can be confusing where it includes lines that were not logged by Disk Utility.

… San Francisco font looks a bit odd on a non-retina MBP …

For me, with a MacBookPro5,2, it's better than whatever was the default with Yosemite (I lost track of workarounds to that awful default). Neither Yosemite nor El Capitan uses a system font as good-looking as the system font in Mavericks.

… Disk utility is not yet complete, they said in the release notes…

With 10.11.1 released, I view Disk Utility as incomplete.

Wow, perceptions differ …

Yeah

I guess that there are some new features in the OS but for me, too much of the user interface has been spoilt so I'm simply not interested. I'm fallout from Apple's ill-fitting one-size-fits-all approach. Continuing my switch to PC-BSD …