Yosemite was one hell of a leap for Apple back in October of 2014. If you really want to nerd out, here’s Apple’s guide to Metal (and note that if you own a Mac from before 2012, you’re out of luck). Some of that will be down to a clean install, no doubt – but the leap is such that I’m convinced that El Capitan is playing a major role. But boot it into 10.11, and it’s perfectly useable. It huffed and puffed under Yosemite’s reign, with regular freezes and beach balls (to the point where I thought that the well-worn spinning hard drive was dying). The result? A battered old laptop is reborn. I’ve used its release as an excuse to wipe my household’s used-and-abused 2012 Macbook Pro 13in, clean installing the final GM release of 10.11. It reduces the CPU load by up to 50%, giving graphics-intensive apps more room to do their thing.Īnd even if you own older Mac hardware, El Capitan could be good news. If you’re interested, this performance transformation is down to the inclusion in El Capitan of Metal, Apple’s graphics technology that first launched with iOS 8 in 2014. You could stare at the screen, watching for the slightest drop in frame rate as you flick applications around, but you’d be wasting your time. It’s stupidly responsive on my 2015 Macbook Pro Retina 13in, even with the display set to the highest resolution (2560×1600). The fact that the irritating stutters were cured by clicking a single (rather hidden) box confirmed everyone’s suspicions: Yosemite simply wasn’t optimised for the fairly intensive gymnastics it was being asked to perform.Įl Capitan, you’ll be delighted to hear, is fast. Specifically, you had to go into Accessibility in System Preferences and disable Transparency, the effect introduced with 10.10 Yosemite, and the cause of the slowdowns. ![]() You could make Yosemite faster, but it required a hack. Click on, say, the Safari icon to maximise a window, and it would react with the kind of stiff reluctance that would be painfully familiar to Samsung TouchWiz users (before the arrival of the Galaxy S6, of course). Talking to a PC when there is a keyboard right in front of you may also strike some users as odd, especially for hard-to-understand names of files and so on, but the option is present.Īpple's approach is far more traditional but that is because no Mac comes with a touchscreen, an area where Cortana may shine just as virtual assistants do on a phone.Yosemite seemed to struggle with animations. While Siri is not available on Mac, Cortana is as yet untested on a PC and only offers as much information as you can get out of Spotlight. Search in Windows 10 integrates Cortana, Microsoft's virtual assistant that is a mixture of Siri and Google Now. ![]() Searches for stocks, sports scores and the weather are all supported, too, right from within Spotlight (which can now be resized and moved around the screen). Apple is aiming to take away that frustration by adding a more "natural" element to searches, allowing queries like "documents I wrote last month about Apple". Searching for files on a computer can be a frustrating experience, especially if you know the file is out there somewhere. ![]() The new checklists feature will be incredibly useful, if not damning for smaller apps, such as Clear. Unlike OneNote and Evernote, Notes is still very much aimed at a consumer audience who don't want to write a book on the service (as Nicolas Carlson of Business Insider did with Evernote). Notes can now contain images, videos, links, checklists and so on, and can sync across all Apple devices seamlessly (or so the theory goes) via iCloud. Meanwhile, Evernote has attracted millions of users across multiple platforms by offering well designed, easy to use apps and services for free, with more available if you pay a subscription.Īpple has evidently seen this and has chosen to beef up its note taking offerings, offering a revamp of Notes in El Capitan. OneNote has taken a far bigger role in the makeup of Windows, becoming almost a "mini Word" in terms of its abilities. ![]() Note taking is one of Microsoft's fortes, especially with the announcement of the Surface and its pen accessory.
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