Today I decided to risk it all and upgrade to El Capitan from Mavericks. I am running a late 2013 retina MacBook Pro with 512gb of storage and a 2.6GHz i5. I am blown away. El Capitan is a lot faster in loading websites, startup and shutdown are a lot faster, and the animations and translucency are flawless. Opening apps is about the same speed wise except for iTunes which takes quite a while longer to open. I suspect that it is an issue with iTunes since all my other apps open in the same amount of time. Another thing that I noticed is that on a fresh boot up (See images below) El Capitan uses a lot less memory and cpu. I don't have screenshots comparing the two operating systems but I know how much memory and ram Mavericks used because I was on Mavericks for a year and a half. The only reason that I upgraded was because for the past month safari would take forever to load webpages and loading the internet in the whole system like iTunes store or any other app that has access to the internet would take forever to load. I was starting to think I had a hardware problem with the wifi card or whatever it is called because I never had an issue with wifi before. I ran an Apple Hardware test on Mavericks and it came back with no issues so I decided it had to be a software issue. The only bad things that I have noticed about El Capitan is that my Mac is running a little warmer and battery life is decreased. It could be that my Mac is still indexing and I need to give it time and then it will not run as warm and hopefully get better battery life. My battery life is at 94% and it says I have 9 hours and 16 minutes remaining which isn't bad. I don't understand why the reviews on the app store are so bad. I kind of just want to know your experiences with El Capitan and if you have decreased battery and a warmer mac. I would also like to know if El Capitan is using less resources on your mac also. Does 10.11.2 beta 4 increases battery life or not? Would love to hear other peoples experiences with El Capitan.
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OS X 10.11.1 faster than 10.9.5
- Thread starter Jerhen
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Mavericks is somewhat of a memory hog on my 2008 MacBook Air, which has only 2 GB. Almost 100% RAM usage on a clean login with no apps open. I noticed an improvement in Yosemite 10.10.3 and later.
Because if you are one of the few unlucky ones who update your computer and then something (or everything) stops working, you are much more tempted to leave a review than if you belong to a majority of users that are happy with the upgrade
I have upgraded a large portion of our department machines to 10.11, including our server Mac Pro, and so far, there was not a single issue.I understand perfectly well why reviews are bad, take a look at El Capitan bugs thread to see some of the problems. In my opinion El Capitan was released months before it was ready. It is in most ways better than Yosemite but at the same time some ways even worse (USB, Spotlight, etc.)
After testing 10.11.1 I have downgraded iMac to Mavericks and I have no intention to "upgrade" to El Capitan any time soon because it offers no benefits for my needs. If Apple improves 10.11 enough I might change my opinion but that is only likely if Apple throws the yearly upgrade cycle into trashcan which isn't likely.
As for speed 10.11 is likely faster than 10.10 on new Macs (Mac Mini 2014 was clearly faster in 10.11), I doubt it would be much faster in old Macs (iMac 2007 4Gb of RAM, no difference between 10.10 and 10.11, Mavericks is clearly faster).
Because if you are one of the few unlucky ones who update your computer and then something (or everything) stops working, you are much more tempted to leave a review than if you belong to a majority of users that are happy with the upgrade
That is difficult to say with certainty. Its possible that majority of users are happy with it but I haven't seen any research that points in either direction.