Background app downloads work the same as any other background download. Apple looks for opportunities to grab the updated bits from the server in a way that impacts you the least. So, if they do their job right, you shouldn't even notice the bits coming down while you work, watch, or while your Mac power naps.

If you get tight on space, Apple will also intelligently remove an unused installer — which can be reclaimed at any time from the cloud — so it doesn't impact your storage.

In other words, it lets the Mac work the way iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV have been working for a while.

If you want to make sure background app download is on, or you hate the idea and want to make sure it's off, you can do that in your Mac App Store preferences.

How to turn on — or turn off — automatic app update downloads on your Mac

1. Launch the Mac App Store on your Mac.
2. Click on App Store in the menubar.
3. Click on Preferences in the dropdown menu.
4. Check the box to the left of Automatic updates.

To disable background updates, repeat the same process and uncheck the box.

Should I leave Automatic Updates on?

If you hate waiting for app updates to download, then yes. That way, whenever you want to update, it'll be ready and waiting for you. Apple will never install an update without your express permission — or action! — but it'll make sure you don't have to wait when you want to install it.

If you have limited bandwidth or you don't want to update to newer versions of an app — for example if you're running a production system and need to wait for apps or drivers to update first — then no. Leave it unchecked and only download when you're sure you really want to.

Any questions?

Not sure about updates? Drop your questions in the comments below!

Apple has been offering public betas for macOS for a couple of years now as a way for those interested in testing out the upcoming software on their Macs, and providing feedback. If that's you, you'll need to sign up, enroll your Mac, download macOS Sierra, and install it. It's not an overly complicated process, but we're here to walk you through it and, if you need it, a place to get extra help.

Apple occasionally offers updates to iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS as closed developer previews or public betas. While the betas contain new features, they also contain pre-release bugs that can prevent the normal use of your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, or Mac, and are not intended for everyday use on a primary device. That's why we strongly recommend staying away from developer previews unless you need them for software development, and using the public betas with caution. If you depend on your devices, wait for the final release.

Note: This guide is being updated in real time. If you are seeing old content, refresh the page or come back later.

• How to make a back up your Mac
• How to register your account for the macOS Sierra public beta
• How to enroll your Mac in the macOS Sierra public beta
• How to install the macOS Sierra public beta
• How to get started with macOS Sierra public beta

How to make a back up of your Mac

Before joining the public beta, you need to make a backup of your Mac. That way, if something goes wrong, of if you're simply not happy and want to revert to OS X El Capitan, you can go right back to where you started.

Even if you back up every night, you'll want to make double, triple sure you're covered. So make a manual backup now. Here's how to do it with Time Machine. Even if you use something different or additional, like SuperDuper!, make sure you manually start a backup now.

1. Click on the Time Machine icon in your Mac Menubar.
2. Click on Backup now.
   
   
   

Let the backup finish before proceeding.

Note: If you're not adverse to the Terminal, you can also make a bootable El Capitan installer as way to jumpstart reversion, if needed.

How to register your account for the macOS Sierra public beta

If you've already joined a public beta for OS X in the past, you don't need to register again for macOS Sierra. Simply sign in with the same Apple ID. If you've never joined a public beta before, you'll need to start by signing up with your Apple ID.

1. Go to beta.apple.com in Safari on your Mac.
2. Click on Sign up to get started. (If you've already signed up for a previous public beta, Click on Sign in and skip to "How to enroll your Mac", below.)
3. Enter you Apple ID email address and password.
4. Click Sign in.
   
   
   

Once you're signed up and signed in, it's time to start downloading.

How to enroll your Mac in the macOS Sierra public beta

Downloading the macOS Sierra public beta is done through the Mac App Store but requires a special code (like a promo or gift code). The code is provided for you on the website, but is also automatically entered for you when you click to begin the process.

1. Go to beta.apple.com, if you're not there already.
2. Click on the macOS tab, if it's not highlighted already.
3. Click the Download macOS Sierra public beta access utility button.
4. Open the file from your Downloads window.
5. Double-click the package to run the installer.

When the installer is finished downloading, the Mac App Store will automatically open to the Updates section. Click Update to download and install the public beta software. After the software has been downloaded, your Mac will automatically restart.

If the latest public beta does not appear on the Updates list, restart your Mac. Then, open the Mac App Store and click the Updates tab.

The public beta update can take a long time to finish downloading, depending on the size. You can check the status in the Updates tab of the Mac App Store.

How to install the macOS Sierra public beta

The macOS Sierra installer will automatically open when it's downloaded. If it doesn't, or if you prefer to do it later, you open Install macOS Sierra Public Beta at any time via Spotlight or Launchpad, or from the Application folder in the Finder.

1. Launch Install macOS Sierra Public Beta app, if it's not launched already.
2. Click Continue at the bottom.
   
   

3. If prompted to make a backup, and you didn't before, click Continue in the dropdown. If you just made a backup, click Cancel.
4. Click Continue at the bottom once your backup completes, or if you skipped it.
5. Click Agree to accept the licensing terms.
6. Click Agree again to confirm.
   
   

7. Click on the drive you want to install onto (if you have multiple options; most people won't.)
8. Click Install.
9. Enter you administrator password and click OK.
10. Click Restart (if your Mac doesn't restart automatically, or you don't want to wait).
    
    
    

Once your Mac reboots, it'll be running macOS Sierra. There's a brief bit of setup you'll need to go through, however, as the system will have changed enough that it'll need your login to complete the update.

Once that's done, you'll be ready to rock macOS Sierra.

What's new, and what if you don't like it?

To help ease your way into everything, make sure you check out our macOS Sierra preview and our comprehensive macOS FAQ for all the details!

And, if you ultimately decide macOS Sierra 10.12.6 isn't for you, you can still revert back to macOS 10.12.5.

Update July 5, 2017: Apple has released macOS Sierra 10.12.6 public beta 6 for members of the Beta Software Program. If you already have the macOS Sierra public beta installed, head to Mac App Store > Updates and download away. If you've been waiting for beta 6 to get started with macOS testing, keep reading and we'll walk you through the set up!

The fourth beta version of OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 is now available for developers. It can be found on Apple's Developer Downloads site, or downloaded from the Updates section of the Mac App Store on a Mac running the previous beta.

Beta Software Program members can also get the latest update. As with the developer beta, the public beta update can be found in the Mac App Store.

OS X 10.11.6 is likely to feature a number of bug fixes and performance improvements, though Apple has not yet detailed what we'll find when it arrives for consumers.

The second public beta version of OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 is now available for members of Apple's Beta Software Program. Members will find the new version in the Update section of the Mac App Store.

Details are still light on the contents of OS X 10.11.6, though it's likely to fix some bugs. At this stage, the update is unlikely to carry major new features, with attention turning to the next major version of OS X, likely 10.12.

Apple has just released the second developer beta of OS X El Capitan 10.11.6. Developers will find the configuration utility needed to install the release at Apple's Mac Developer Resource Center{.nofollow}. It can also be installed from the Updates section of the Mac App Store on a machine running the previous beta.

It's not known at this time what OS X 10.11.6 brings along with it, though it likely contains some bug fixes and performance improvements.

Apple has just released the first developer beta of OS X El Capitan 10.11.6. Interested developers will find the configuration utility needed to install the release can be found at Apple's Mac Developer Resource Center{.nofollow}. It can also be installed from the Updates section of the Mac App Store on a machine running the previous beta.

It's not known at this time what OS X 10.11.6 brings along with it, though it likely contains some bug fixes and performance improvements.

The third developer beta for OS X El Capitan 10.11.5 is now available from Apple. Interested developers will find the configuration utility needed to install the release can be found at Apple's Mac Developer Resource Center{.nofollow}. It can also be installed from the Updates section of the Mac App Store on a machine running the previous beta.

Apple has also released the third version of the OS X 10.11.5 public beta. If you're a member of the Beta Software Program, you'll find the new release in the Mac App Store as well.

It's not known at this time what changes will come with OS X 10.11.5 when it launches publicly. It will likely feature a number of bug fixes and performance improvements.

Apple has pushed OS X El Capitan 10.11.3 out to everyone to download. This update doesn't bring any huge changes with it, and instead focuses on making your Mac even more stable and secure. The changelog for this update includes:

You can grab the latest version of El Capitan from the Mac App Store now.

Apple has released OS X 10.11.1, bringing along with it a number of fixes and improvements. The update, which is available now through the Mac App Store, brings new emoji, improvements for Microsoft Office 2016 compatibility and much more. A full list of the changes in OS X 10.11.1 include:

• Improves installer reliability when upgrading to OS X El Capitan
• Improves compatibility with Microsoft Office 2016
• Fixes an issue where outgoing server information may be missing from Mail
• Resolves an issue that prevented display of messages and mailboxes in Mail
• Resolves an issue that prevents certain Audio Unit plug-ins from functioning properly
• Improves VoiceOver reliability
• Adds over 150 new emoji characters with full Unicode 7.0 and 8.0 support

It may take a little before you see the update show for you in the Mac App Store, but keep an eye out. If you happen to notice any other improvements or issues with this build, let us know in the comments below.

If you've always dreamed of shouting spoken commands to your computers like the folks on your favorite science-fiction series, you can get just a wee bit closer with the dictation accessibility features in OS X El Capitan.

The latest version of OS X offers special accessibility features for spoken commands: They aren't nearly as robust (nor reliable) as Siri on iOS, but if you're itching to talk to your Mac and have it respond, here's how to go about it.

How to set up Dictation on your Mac

Before you can enable spoken commands, you have to set up Dictation on your Mac, first.

1. Open System Preferences by going to the Apple Menu > System Preferences.
2. Click Dictation & Speech.
   
   
   

3. Turn Dictation On, and select the Use Enhanced Dictation checkbox.

How to set up OS X's dictation keyword phrase

1. Return to the main System Preferences screen and select Accessibility.
2. Select the Dictation submenu.
3. Click the checkbox next to "Enable the dictation keyword phrase". By default, the triggering phrase is "Computer", but you can substitute any other word or series of words.
   
   
   

4. Click on the Dictation Commands button.
5. Check Enable advanced commands.
   
   

How to use dictation keyword phrases on your Mac

Once you've done the necessary setup, you can browse the Dictation Commands screen for various phrases you can say to your Mac. I've had about 50-75 percent success rate triggering these in my uses—OS X is a lot more familiar with words in its default dictionary than specialty apps, for example—and I highly recommend enabling the Play sound when command is recognized checkbox, as there's no "uh-uh" warning if your command was rejected or otherwise unheard. If you want to play around with these phrases, however, here are some of my favorites.

The simplest ones have to do with dictation themselves:

You can also do a lot more with your keyword phrase, however, including searching Spotlight:

Also enabled: A variety of great controls for manipulating text, hands-free:

Finally, you can manipulate apps by switching to them, showing them, or hiding them:

And if you're ever unsure about what Dictation Commands can do for you, simply say:

You can even add your own custom tasks to the mix if you're so inclined: Under the Dictation Commands submenu, press the plus button to create a new phrase-based command. You can open Finder items, a URL, paste text or data, execute a keyboard shortcut, select a menu, or run an Automator workflow. For best results, Apple recommends avoiding phrases that include proper names, names used for other commands, and names with a single syllable.

Questions?

Are you going to try OS X's dictation commands and keyword phrases? Already been using them on your Mac and have questions? Let us know below.

If you've either been waiting to update to OS X El Capitan because of issues with Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, or you've simply been suffering through them, good news—Microsoft has just pushed out a compatibility fix.

The Office for Mac 2011 patch brings the version number up to 14.5.6. The description says:

Microsoft has yet to issue a similar patch for Office 2016, which has been causing issues for customers as well. Hopefully that will follow soon.

• Free - Download now

While ad blocking extensions for iPhone and iPad may have gotten all the attention, Apple has enabled the same content blocking architecture for macOS, too. Here are some of the options available for you.

Adamant

• Download now

Ka-Block!

• Download now

NoThirdParty

• Download now

Roadblock

• Download now

Wipr

• Download now

And... more?

Yeah, slim pickings so far compared to iOS. That's likely due to the existing ad blocker market on desktop, and the relegation of Mac content blockers to the plugin page rather than the Mac App Store.

• Best content blockers for iPhone and iPad

If you try them out, let us know your favorites. And as soon as we've had a chance to test them all—and more of them come out—we'll let you know which one(s) we think are best!

A large number of Macs are able to upgrade to El Capitan, so chances are your Mac can too. But make things easy on yourself and read through this checklist before you do.

D.C. writes:

Yes, you should. I wouldn't recommend rushing it, but if you back up your Mac first, your Mac is well within the supported model range and should handle El Capitan quite well.

The system requirements for El Capitan are the same ones for Yosemite before it. In fact, Apple hasn't substantially changed the hardware system requirements in some time. Seven year old Macs can run El Capitan.

Macs that have more RAM (Memory, in Apple's "About this Mac" parlance) can run newer Mac operating systems and apps better; 4 is now the minimum. And some features, like Handoff (introduced in Yosemite) will only work with the version of Bluetooth found in newer Macs.

Apple's focused on a lot of productivity enhancements with El Capitan: Split View, for example, which lets you split the screen between two open windows of two different apps; It's an iOS 9 exclusive for the iPad Air 2 and iPad Pro, but it works on the Mac, period. You can read a lot more about it here:

• OS X El Capitan review

Here's are two things I encourage you to remember with any operating system upgrade: Make sure your data is safe before you make any changes, and make sure you're going to see a benefit before you do.

Back up!

Backing up your Mac with Time Machine is the fastest and most foolproof way to prep it for an upgrade to El Capitan. Once that's done you'll be able to restore your Mac back the way it was, if you have to. The easiest way to get started with Time Machine is to turn it on in System preferences, then connect an external USB hard drive. Time Machine will ask you if you want it to use the external hard drive. Say yes and then let it do its thing.

• How to back up and restore your Mac with Time Machine

There are other backup apps too: I'm fond of SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner, which are great for creating "clones" — exact duplicates of your hard drive — that you can restore from in a pinch, but I think Time Machine is what most people need.

Assess the risk

Unless you have a reason to, don't bother to upgrade on day one. Let other people fall on that sword, like us! Launch day inevitably brings in a lot of confusion, too.

It's good to keep an eye on the social media accounts of the vendors whose apps you use, so you can see if they've prepped any updates for El Capitan or plan any. In some cases they'll have important compatibility fixes; in others they may try to introduce new features. We've already gotten a flurry of El Capitan app updates leading up to the software's release this week, and we're reporting on them too, so keep your eyes on iMore, too.

If there are specific apps or tools you absolutely depend on to work, make sure they're going to work okay with El Capitan before you upgrade. That might mean hunting around the developer's web site, user forums and social media accounts to make sure.

Especially if your livelihood is linked to how well your Mac is working, I strongly encourage you to tread carefully: Make sure your stuff works first!

Finally, see if the changes in El Capitan - Split View, improved Mission Control, better Notes and Mail and more - are worth it to you. You may decide that you're happy with your current workflow, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it can be smart — change for change's sake can be really disruptive, and there's nothing that says you have to install El Capitan today. It's not going to diminish your Mac-using experience to stick with what you're familiar with.

I'm really excited about El Capitan — I've been using the betas for months, and I'm loving Split View and Spotlight, especially. So I'm all in. As long as you take good precautions like backing up your data before you upgrade, you should be in good shape to make the jump whenever you're ready.

Microsoft has just released the latest version of its Skype messaging app for the Mac. As you might expect, the new 7.13 adds support for the recently-launched OS X El Capitan and it also supports the Split View multitasking mode in that OS as well.

In addition, Microsoft says:

Be aware that Skype 7.13 for the Mac requires OS X 10.9 or later.

• Free - Download now

OS X El Capitan is here for the masses, and for beta users, that means a chance to once again live on the production software seed. The OS X El Capitan GM is a few version numbers behind the production software, so if you want the latest and greatest, here's how to hop back on to the production train. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's a delta update, so you will have to download the full 6GB installer to proceed.

Remember: Always make sure you have a backup of your information before attempting any OS X upgrades, for safety's sake.

1. Launch the Mac App Store from your Dock (or by typing Command-Spacebar to launch Spotlight and then entering in App Store).
2. Click on the Featured tab.
3. When OS X launches, there should be a gigantic OS X El Capitan banner atop the Featured page. If you don't see this, you can also go to the OS X El Capitan link under Quick Links and above Apps Made by Apple. Or you can click here for the direct link.
   
   
   

4. Click the Download button underneath the OS X El Capitan icon.
5. When the App Store asks if you'd like to continue, press Continue. The installer will then proceed to download.
   
   
   

6. When the installer launches, go ahead and install it.

We'll also have instructions for folks trying to roll back from the beta version of OS X 10.11.1 very soon.

Questions?

Let us know in the comments and we'll try to get you sorted out.

OS X El Capitan is here, and we're super-excited about it. I've been using the OS X beta for a few months now, and I love how solid El Capitan feels. But moreover, I love all the little bits hidden away in it. So without further ado, let me introduce you to my favorite hidden features from this year's OS X release.

1. Photos for OS X gripes begone

This makes the very top of my OS X El Capitan list: improvements to the Photos app. Not only has El Capitan brought in third-party in-app editing extensions (yes!) but it's also offering sort-by-date for albums (yippee!) and batch editing (wahoo!). Lack of editing extensions was one of my biggest Photos 1.0 gripes, and I'm so excited to edit with tools other than OS X's defaults. A "Open in" menu would still be nice, but hey: Beggars can't be choosers.

2. Find your cursor

If you have a large monitor or constantly find yourself losing your cursor, this OS X El Capitan feature may save your life: When you jiggle your cursor up and down to find it, it auto-magnifies, to help you quickly find where it might be hiding on your screen. (It's also ridiculously fun to do while procrastinating.)

3. Record, list, and save webpages in Notes

My next three picks are Notes app features. I'm not sorry, because Apple's improvements to Notes in OS X El Capitan are awesome. First off, Notes isn't limited to plain text and the occasional attachment anymore: It can ingest and pin sketches from your iOS devices as well as audio notes, webpages, photos, videos, documents, and map locations—all interactive.

Adding photos, links, and more to Notes is all well and good, but what if you want to find a specific image? The new Notes app in OS X El Capitan makes this easy by taking a page from the Messages app: It now has an Attachments browser, modeled after Messages's Details menu. I realize that apps like Evernote have been doing this for years, but it's great to see Apple incorporating more advanced features at the OS level.

And copy and paste is so 2014: In OS X El Capitan, you can automatically add information, links, and more to Notes and Reminders—all by using the Share button to send your content to your other apps.

4. You can resize (and move!) Spotlight

Though it's a wonderful app, this was the nail in my third-party launcher's coffin: Not only is Spotlight getting natural language improvements and additional search options, but it can now be resized and moved around your screen. So nice. I use Spotlight constantly for calculator conversions because of it.

5. There's a Find my Friends widget

Want to find your friends outside of the Messages app? There's a Notification Center widget for that. Just click the Edit button, then add Find My Friends from the Items screen. Clicking on someone's profile will provide you with a map tile which you can then zoom in on.

6. AirPlay video files from Safari—in full screen

Who needs Chromecast? In OS X El Capitan, Safari can use AirPlay to send full-screen video from any website to your Apple TV. Mirroring your Safari windows to watch wftda.tv roller derby playoffs? A thing of the past.

7. Mute auto-playing video

Apple has tackled the worst part of the internet in OS X El Capitan: auto-playing videos. Ugh. I hate these things, and Apple does too, and now you can mute anything that makes noise from the Safari URL bar, as well as quickly select the offending tab and dispense of it.

8. Drag and drop windows to new desktops

In OS X Yosemite, you could drag a window from space to space by bumping it up against the edge of your screen, but were out of luck if you didn't have an additional space to drag to. Not with the new version of OS X: El Capitan will not only let you create a new space from your window by dragging to a corner—regardless of how many spaces you have—but also combine windows together into Split View mode, drag spaces around, and more. It's probably my most-used feature on my 11-inch MacBook Air.

9. Add suggested events and contacts

If someone emails you a dinner invitation or a meeting time suggestion, Mail in El Capitan can automatically suggest an event be created based on that info. It's smart enough to figure out if the sender of the email is someone in your Contacts database, and lets you add them with one click. If their email address changes, Mail will try to keep you up to date as well.

10. Tabs in Mail

Tabs have long been commonplace in Safari and last year Apple brought tabs to Finder windows in OS X Yosemite. If you have a bunch of emails open at once and you need to copy and paste between them or want to compare information, now you'll have a much easier time thanks to Tabs in Mail.

Your picks?

Even with this list, I've just scratched the surface of new OS X El Capitan features. There's lots of other exciting things: the new San Francisco system font; time to leave integrated into your appointments and notifications; renaming files from the context menu; strikethrough in Mail; and a new Disk Utility app. What's on your list?

OS X El Capitan, the latest version of Apple's operating system for the Mac, is now available for download. The update is free through the Mac App Store, and is available for owners of Macs from 2009 or later, as well as some models from 2007 and 2008.

Also known as OS X 10.11, El Capitan improves and refines the Mac experience in a number of ways. There's a new Mission Control, a revamped Notes app, and enhancements to Safari. Apple has also added its Metal graphics framework to the Mac. For a more comprehensive picture of OS X El Capitan, be sure to read our review.

• Download OS X El Capitan from the Mac App Store
• How to install and get started with OS X El Capitan

OS X El Capitan has been shown off, previewed, and is about ready to hit the Mac App Store. Over the last few months, we've gotten a lot of questions, and that means we're going to be providing a lot of answers!

• OS X El Capitan: Our review
• OS X El Capitan: What's changed

What is OS X El Capitan and when can you get it?

OS X El Capitan is the latest version of Apple's operating system for the Mac personal computer. That includes both desktops like the Mac mini, iMac, and Mac Pro, and laptops like the MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

OS X 10.11. And yes, Apple really can go to 11!

El Capitan is the name of a major rock outcropping in Yosemite National Park. Since the last version of OS X was named Yosemite, and this version is meant to be a refinement and advancement of Yosemite, it's named El Capitan.

It's similar to how OS X Leopard was followed by OS X Snow Leopard, and OS X Lion was followed by OS X Mountain Lion.

Yes! In a cute little aside in Mail during Apple's September event, Apple SVP Craig Federighi revealed that OS X El Capitan will be launching on September 30. It'll be a free update, and you can get it from the Mac App Store.

• How to install and get started with OS X El Capitan

Easy, just check this list. If you're Mac is on it, you can run OS X El Capitan.

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

If your Mac was built pre-2012, you sadly won't be able to take advantage of the Metal graphics framework. Otherwise, you've got everything from OS X El Capitan available to you.

Mac App Store. OS X El Capitan will show up there once it's released, and you'll be able to download it just like any update.

Right! Apple has said all OS X updates will be free-as-in-zero-money going forward.

Apps and experience

Apple has announced Split View apps, an improved Mission Control window management system, find your cursor, a much smarter Spotlight search, better full-screen Mail, a new Notes app, Safari browser with pinned tabs, additional features for Photos, transit directions in Maps, a new font for English and Chinese, and improved language input for Chinese and Japanese. There's also Metal for Mac, so you get better performance, and new security features, so you stay safer.

Back with OS X Lion, Apple brought the idea of iPad-style full-screen apps "back to the Mac". They work well but don't always take advantage of wider screens and multitasking operating systems. So, Split View lets you dock two apps side-by-side. That way, wider screens are better filled, and you can multitask between both without quite as much distraction as the traditional multi-window desktop.

Click and hold the green traffic-light style button at the top left of the app window, and then drag towards the side of the window you want to dock it on. You can also drag apps together while in Mission Control.

No. Split View is currently for two apps and two apps alone.

You'll be able to adjust them, but within reason. Most apps have a minimum width they support, especially multi-column apps. You can't go narrower than the minimum.

A lot! It's better arranged, so all your open windows will be displayed in one, easy-to-see, flat surface that respects their original position on the desktop.

What's more, you'll be able to drag a window up and, into the Spaces Bar, drop it on a different desktop, arrange it as a full screen app, add it to an existing full screen app to create a Split View, or use it to bring up another desktop.

If that's not enough, there's also Find my Cursor...

It's a fantastically silly little trick to help you find a lost pointer. Just grab your mouse, or touch your trackpad, and shake. The cursor will move, as always, but also grow to an unusual size, so it's even easier to see.

It's becoming more like Siri, only you'll still type to use it instead of talk.

With a little something awesome called natural language. If you've ever used Fantastical, you'll have an idea of what it's like. Basically, you'll be able to type in questions using regular phrasing, like "show me documents from last week that are about bananas" or "what's the weather in Bermuda?".

Since Spotlight now supports weather, sports, stocks, web video, and more, there's a wide range of information it can retrieve.

Correct. Spotlight can give similar answers, Dictation can do voice-to-text, and accessibility can do text-to-voice, but there's no Siri-style voice control on the Mac.

(It'd be great for accessibility if there were, so let's hope it comes eventually!)

You'll be able to move and resize the Spotlight window. That'll make it more convenient to use if you're checking it often while working in another app.

Taking a cue from iOS, you'll be able to have multiple drafts live at the same time in full-screen mode.

Tabs! Start a new draft and you'll get a new tab.

Gesture support, so you'll be able to swipe to trash messages or mark them as read.

Nope! You can use swipe gestures in Messages conversations, notes in the Notes app, Reading List items in Safari, and lists in Reminders as well!

Yup! Gmail has what could politely be called an eccentric IMAP implementation, and one they change on occasion as well. El Capitan will have a new IMAP engine and, in general, should do a much better job corralling Gmail and getting it to play better on the Mac.

Think of the new Notes app as a way to easily jot down and collect anything that's really important to you. Like a memory pad.

There'll be more formatting options, including the ability to quickly convert items into a checklist, so you'll be able to keep track of what needs to be done. You'll also be able to drag in, or send in, websites, photos, locations, and more.

So far, Apple's said:

• Photos
• PDFs
• Videos
• Audio
• Map locations
• Pages documents
• Numbers spreadsheets
• Keynote presentations

And "more". What the "more" is we'll have to wait and see.

Yup! From Safari, Maps, Photos, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc., just choose what you want to clip, go to the Share Sheet, and send it to Notes. You'll be able to choose to add it to a new note, or an existing one. It's pretty cool.

Kind of. You'll be able to view sketches made on iPhones or iPads, but you won't be able to create new ones on the Mac—at least, not yet. Given how great the Force Touch trackpads are becoming, we hope that gets added soon.

You'll be able to search, as always, and there'll also be a new attachment browser that lets you more easily, more visually, find what you've added to Notes.

Reminders lets you set time- or location-based alerts for your checklist items and integrates with Calendar. Notes will let you make quick checklists, and in the context of additional text and clippings if you want them for reference.

A lot of features that check off a lot of wish-list items. First and foremost, we'll be getting editing extensions.

Indeed! Apps that include editing extensions will provide filters and effects that you'll be able to apply to your pictures right inside Apple's Photos apps.

Exactly! As part of a complete app, or simply a bundle of extensions.

You bet your bitmap! Apply an editing extension, go back and tweak it later, or remove it. At least that's what it sounds like. We'll have to wait to try it out to know for sure.

Yes to both! You'll be able to geo-tag single pictures, selections, or entire moments. (You can actually batch-process many meta-data fields now, including the title.)

Adding people to Faces is also faster, and you'll be able to sort albums and content by date, title, and more as well.

No mention of it yet, alas.

Signs point to "yes". Apple said the company wouldn't be updating Aperture any more, but that doesn't mean the existing version won't run.

Of course, we'll have to wait for the release version to know for sure. In the meantime, our guess is it'll work if perhaps not perfectly.

Plenty! Safari will let you pin sites so you can always have your favorite pages open and instantly accessible. You'll get a small tab on the right with an icon, so you'll be able to easily identify them, and any link you click will open in a new tab so you'll never lose the page you pinned.

No! You'll be able to AirPlay just the videos, similar to iOS. Like a human being!

(The video will need to be HTML5 and compatible with AirPlay, of course.)

Like a boss! There'll be a new audio icon to the right side of the smart search bar. Click it and all Safari audio will die. Click an hold and you'll see individual tabs that are playing audio and be able to kill them selectively.

It's nirvana.

It is! There'll be a new map view that's optimized just for transit, and that'll show you all the bus, train, and subway/metro routes you'll need. Because not all stations and stops are connected, you'll also get walking directions to get you from one to the other, as needed.

Once you've planned your route, you'll be able to send it to your iPhone for step-by-step directions on the go.

Now, an hour from now, later the same day or night, it's all good. You'll even be able to choose the time you want to arrive and see which routes will get you there.

That... depends on where you live. Apple has announced transit for:

• London
• New York
• San Francisco Bay Area
• Toronto
• Baltimore
• Berlin
• Chicago
• Mexico City
• Philadelphia
• Washington, DC

And over 300 cities in China, including:

• Beijing
• Shanghai
• Guangzhou
• Shenzen

In most of the world, transit is owned by municipalities that keep it in different formats and don't always share nicely with others. In China, it's all unified and centralized.

So, getting China was relatively easy for Apple. Getting everywhere else is going to be an arduous, likely frustrating process for everyone.

Through and likely frustrating process for everyone. They just started earlier.

Our guess is once Apple ramps up, the company will ramp up.

Performance, security, and privacy

According to Apple, yes indeed! Apps will launch up to 40% faster, switching between apps will be up to 2x faster, complex PDFs will open up to 4x faster, and mail will get you your important messages up 2x faster on setup.

Part of that has to do with Metal, Apple's graphics API introduced on iOS 8 and now brought over to the Mac.

As in "write to the Metal", or target the hardware as directly as possible so that you get the best performance possible.

Originally Metal was meant to perform better than OpenGL, the traditional Open Graphics Language, but Apple has now including OpenCL — the Open Computing Language — as well. What's more, they've rebuilt Core Graphics and Core Animation on top of Metal, so a lot of the performance enhancements should just happen, without much extra effort from developers.

Sorry. More detailed games, faster pro apps like Illustrator and After Effects.

As did we all! Lets just say yesterday's frustrations are often forgotten while today's frustrations never cease to annoy. Regardless of how good or bad OS X Yosemite was for you, though, Apple seems to have paid attention and stability is a big focus in OS X El Capitan as well.

There's App Transport Security, which should force us all towards TLS 1.2, and hopefully better, connections. That keeps your data safe between apps and web back ends.

There's also System Integrity Protection, which brings iOS-style root security to the Mac. Since a lot of people, if not most, run as administrator on OS X, it should help prevent malware from accessing and modifying the system.

Yes and no. Apple is trying, previously with things like the Mac App Store, sandboxing, and Gate Keeper, to let regular people use the Mac without worrying about getting hacked or otherwise targeted.

In all of those cases, however, Apple still left the Mac open to things like untrusted web downloads, if you really wanted to use them.

There's not a lot of information available yet about the new security systems, but if history is any indicator, there will be ways for expert users to opt-out of the ones they don't want to use. So, theoretically, you'll be able to keep running homebrew and even hacks, but at the cost of losing the new protection, of course.

Well, Apple is making privacy a major focus from CEO Tim Cook down to the software. The way that manifests on OS X El Capitan is, for things like Spotlight, an architectural difference.

Instead of taking your data up to the cloud and operating on it there, the way an Internet company like Google or Facebook might, Apple operates on Internet data in the cloud, then brings it down to your device, and operates on your data there.

That way, you don't have to worry about your personal data persisting on Apple's servers.

Apple has also said they won't share data from one service to another, so if you use Apple for only a few things, you don't have to worry about your data being available to other things.

Whether or not that matters to you will depend on how you feel about online privacy to begin with. No matter what, though, it's good for everyone to have options and alternatives.

Fonts and language support

Yup! After years of Lucida Grande and a brief fling with Helvetic Neue, Apple has announced San Francisco as the typeface, company-wide, and SF as the new font for OS X El Capitan.

Close. The Apple Watch uses SF Compact and OS X and iOS use SF. SF (non-compact) is better optimized for larger displays like the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Correct! There are two optical sizes for SF, Text and Display. Text is for anything under 20 pt, Display for anything over 20 pt. Most times you won't have to worry about this, as the system handles it automatically. If you're doing work in an image editor like Photoshop, however, and want to absolutely match the way SF looks on the screen, you'll need to manually change from Text to Display when you go above 20 pt.

SF has six weights for Text, both regular and italic:

• Light
• Regular
• Medium
• Semibold
• Bold
• Heavy

SF has nine weights for Display, both regular and italic. The additional weights are:

• Ultralight
• Thin
• Black

There is! Ping Fang (苹方)! It consists of roughly 50,000 characters and like San Francisco, it's modern and focused on legibility.

There are four new Japanese fonts, just not a new system font. That honor still goes to Hiragino Sans (formerly known as Hiragino Kaku Gothic).

Indeed! Chinese will get an advanced prediction engine, more frequently updated dictionaries, and an expandable candidate window. It will learn the words and phrases—and emoji!—you use most often and stack them front and center on the candidate window for faster selection.

Even better, you'll be able to write multiple Chinese characters on the Mac Trackpad in a row, and the software window will be proportional to the Trackpad size.

Japanese input gets an enhanced vocabulary and improved engine, but it also gets live conversion, which replaces text strings automagically with Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and even Roman words—all in real time. If you've ever seen Siri refine speech-to-text as you continue talking, then imagine that for text conversion. It reduces what used to be a cumbersome, multi-step process into something fast and streamlined.

And more!

There's a lot of other great stuff coming to OS X El Capitan this fall. That includes great new APIs for developers like NSCollectionView, NSStackView, TextKit, Force Touch and haptics, and more. Suffice it to say, it looks like it's going to be a great year for the Mac.

If you have any other questions you want answered, leave them in the comments below. OS X El Capitan is still in closed developer beta, and subject to the usual limitations there of, but there's a lot we can talk about this year. So, get to asking!

OS X El Capitan, or OS X 10.11, is the next major version of Apple's Mac operating system. As you might guess from the name, it builds off OS X Yosemite the way OS X Snow Leopard enhanced Leopard: with stability, smarts, and a few new features to spruce things up.

If you want a truly deep dive into OS X El Capitan, check out Rene's fantastic review. But if you're looking for the highlights of what's changed in OS X El Capitan, I'm your girl. And our first stop on this tour of this great granite OS X rock: Mission Control.

• OS X El Capitan - Free - Download now!

Mission Control and Split View Apps

If you live on a small laptop, you likely appreciate the wonders of Spaces and Mission Control, Apple's window management software. Since its official debut in OS X Lion (prior to that, the Mac had Exposé), Mission Control has evolved to help you best view all your windows in shrunken form and control for multiple desktops and full-screen apps.

In OS X El Capitan, it gets a makeover. No longer is your desktop blurred out with windows thrown helter-skelter: Instead, windows smartly travel as they resize, displaying in their approximate locations while minimizing them enough to view it all. In addition, the Spaces Bar has been shrunk, only displaying Desktop and window names by default—revealing your full desktop windows on mouse-over.

Drag-and-drop support for apps is much improved, letting you not only create full-screen apps by throwing them up in Mission Control's Spaces bar, but also return them to window size by dragging them back to the desktop of your choice. Or, even better: Drop them atop another full-screen app to create Split View.

When you create a Split View desktop, OS X sticks two apps side-by-side with a black pixel border between them; that border is draggable, allowing you to resize the apps on the fly, depending on which you want more screen real estate for.

You can create full-screen apps and Split View desktops by clicking (or clicking and holding) on the green maximize button in a window's title bar, but I vastly prefer dragging and dropping in Mission Control: You can move a window up to the Spaces bar to make it full-screen, drag it atop an already-full-screen app to create a Split View, or drag apps out of the toolbar to return them to the Desktop.

As Rene noted in his review, there's no way to cycle through apps in Split Screen mode: The two app windows you've picked are the two you're going to live with in that Desktop until you create a new Split Screen interface. (I will note that I said "windows" here, not apps—you can have multiple instances of Safari, for example, each paired with a different app.)

Spotlight and search

This year is Spotlight's tenth anniversary on the Mac. Apple's reinvented search infrastructure for OS X premiered in April 2005, and throughout the years let users search for files, dictionary definitions, apps, and even on Wikipedia and the web. In OS X Yosemite last year, we saw Spotlight move from its long-storied spot in the OS X the toolbar to a locked floating window; in El Capitan, that window can be moved and resized anywhere on the screen, and you can do lots, lots more with it.

As in iOS 9, Apple has used Siri's natural language processing as the backbone of Spotlight, allowing users for the first time to query the search service in sentences and phrases. (This is built into Mail and Finder searches, as well, which also run using Spotlight's underlying search engine.)

Type "what's the weather in cupertino," or "el cap documents I worked on last week," and Spotlight will intelligently process what you're asking for, returning you the most relevant search results.

You can also search for stocks, weather, sports scores and schedules, web videos, and maps, in addition to documents and files on your hard drive.

While I've used Spotlight in the past primarily as an app launcher, with its expanded support it's easy to do a lot more with it in OS X El Capitan.

Notes

A redesigned Notes app in iOS 9 meant that a redesigned version for the Mac couldn't be far behind—and lo, with OS X El Capitan, the Mac's Notes app gets a major upgrade. First off, your Notes are now all synced via iCloud, where you can view them on iCloud.com, any other Macs you own, or your iOS devices.

Like iOS 9, you can add almost any kind of file to a note, create bulleted lists and format text, and send URLs and text to Notes from the Share sheet in any other app. There's even an attachment browser so that you can see the files you've collected.

Sadly, there's no option for free-form sketching on OS X—maybe once there are more Force Touch trackpads in the wild—but you can view sketches from your iOS devices on your Mac.

Safari

Apple's web browser is one of the few OS X programs that gets updated often outside of major OS X updates, so its new El Capitan features are few—but still much-needed.

The biggest interface change for Safari is in Pinned Sites: These tabs live permanently in your toolbar, signified by small icons in the left corner of the screen. Creating one involves simply dragging a tab to the far left of the tabs bar; it will then live in your window until you drag it away from its left alignment.

Speaking of the toolbar, the Safari URL bar now incorporates Spotlight search into its operational parameters, letting you search for weather, third-party app data, and more.

Safari also has a few other nice bits for frequent web users: Buttons for identifying and muting audio in tabs, AirPlay video support for single windows, support for Shared Links extensions (which embed third-party search data into the Safari URL bar), Content Blocker extensions, and text and color adjustments within Safari Reader. And for developers, a redesigned Web Inspector offers a responsive tab-based interface for front-end coders and designers.

Mail

Mail's OS X El Capitan tweaks are mostly interface and search-related, though there's a few infrastructure improvements under the hood, too.

You can now use multitouch gestures (if you have a trackpad) within Mail to swipe on your messages, either to mark them as read or delete them. In addition, if you enjoy using Mail in full-screen mode, you'll love Mail's new multitasking drafts mode: It lets you hide in-progress messages using the minimize button at the bottom of the screen while searching your Mailbox. And Mail adds a tabbed interface for your drafts, for even greater productivity.

Inside your email, OS X has added support for data detectors: This means that potential contacts and events get suggested right underneath the address bar for a more immediate overview.

On the search front, Mail incorporates Spotlight's natural language engine for simpler email searches ("Rick from last week"), no proper booleans required.

And perhaps the most exciting bit for those of us with large IMAP accounts: Mail has been optimized to pull Inbox and other importnat messages first over your IMAP archive, which means that on a slow connection, you'll no longer have to sit, staring at your email, waiting multiple minutes for it to refresh.

Maps

Alongside its iOS 9 cousin, Maps at last brings transit directions to the Mac in OS X El Capitan. You can currently view transit directions for Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Philidelphia, San Francisco, Washington DC, Toronto, Mexico City, London, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzen, and 300 other cities in China; with more, hopefully, to come very soon.

Photos

iPhoto got a huge overhaul this spring, becoming Photos for OS X—Apple's next-generation photo management and editing software. Now, OS X El Capitan aims to take Photos one step further into must-use territory with support for third-party editing extensions and batch metadata editing.

Third-party extensions are the big one here: Though Photos still doesn't suppport "Open in" the app of your choice, those apps can now write extensions that port parts of their functionality into the Photos app. So if you don't like the options for color-correction in the stock Photos editing interface, you'll be able to switch over to a different editor.

On the metadata adding front, being able to add and edit locations is a nice fix—Photos launched without any geotagging support, making it hard to fix mislabeled geotags or tag DSLR without GPS locations on them.

Lastly, you can also sort Photos albums by date, title, or custom order—no more dealing with strict latest-to-earliest sort.

Miscellany

There are plenty of other, smaller tweaks and under-the-hood improvements hiding in OS X:

• Can't find your cursor on your iMac? Wiggle your mouse to and fro to activate Find My Cursor, which balloons the cursor briefly to a much larger size.
• There's a Notification Center widget for Find My Friends.
• Disk Utility has been revamped with a new look and easier-to-use controls.
• Time to leave has been integrated into your calendar appointments and notifications.
• You can rename files from the context menu.
• Audio extensions allow for easy-to-create (and download) audio plugins for your favorite apps.
• Apple's iOS graphics framework, Metal, has come to the Mac, replacing OpenGL.
• Apple has beefed up OS X's security with System Integrity Protection—root-level defense against malicious apps or users—and Application Transport Security—which keeps your data secure between your Mac and web services.
• Goodbye, Helvetica Neue: San Francisco is now the default font on the Mac with OS X El Capitan.
• Speaking of fonts, OS X provides better Chinese and Japanese language support with a new Chinese system font called Ping Fang and Japanese font called Hiragino Sans, along with better keyboard input and live conversation.
• New trackpad APIs for developers who want to develop for Force Touch trackpads.

Anything we missed?

Got questions about OS X El Capitan, or spotted something cool we missed? Let us know below.

OS X Leopard begat OS X Snow Leopard. OS X Lion begat OS X Mountain Lion. And now OS X Yosemite has begotten OS X El Capitan. Just as the granite monolith is part of the national park yet every bit a landmark in its own right, so is Apple's latest operating system for the Mac. It has the same general design and architecture as what came before, but brings an entirely new level of intelligence, convenience, and polish.

That includes an improved Mission Control and new Split View; a smarter Spotlight and improved apps like Notes, Safari, Mail, Maps, and Photos; enhanced security and performance, including bringing the Metal graphics framework to the Mac; and new system fonts like San Francisco for alphabetic languages and Ping Fang for Chinese. There's also content blocking extensions, audio unit extensions, and much more going on under the hood as well.

Apple's climbing El Capitan, they say, to refine the OS X experience and improve the performance. So, did they make it to the top?

• Free - Download now

OS X El Capitan Table of Contents

• Window Management
• Spotlight
• Notes
• Safari
• Mail
• Maps
• Photos
• Performance
• Security
• Typography
• Trackpad
• Miscellaneous
• Bottom line

OS X El Capitan Evolution

Version	OS X 10.0	OS X 10.1	OS X 10.2	OS X 10.3	OS X 10.4	OS X 10.5	OS X 10.6	OS X 10.7	OS X 10.8	OS X 10.9	OS X 10.10	OS X 10.11
Release name	Cheetah	Puma	Jaguar	Panther	Tiger	Leopard	Snow Leopard	Lion	Mountain Lion	Mavericks	Yosemite	El Capitan
Code name	Cheetah	Puma	Jaguar	Pinot	Merlot (PPC) Chardonnay (Intel)	Chablis	Snow Leopard	Barolo	Zinfandel	Cabernet	Syrah	Gala
Architecture	PowerPC	PowerPC	PowerPC	PowerPC	PowerPC/Intel	PowerPC/Intel	Intel	Intel	Intel	Intel	Intel	Intel
Features	Pre-emptive multitasking Memory protection Aqua interface	Performance Enhanced CD/DVD support Enhanced 3D Improved AppleScript ColorSync 4.0 Image Capture	Address Book Rendezvous/Bonjour CUPS printing Revamped Finder Spam filtering Windows networking Quartz Extreme Sherlock 3 Universal Access QuickTime 6 Performance Journaling	Fast user switching Exposé FileVault iChat AV X11	Spotlight Safari RSS Mail 2 Dashboard Automator VoiceOver QuickTime 7 Dashboard Quartz Composer Rosetta Core Image Core Data Core Video	Back to My Mac Boot Camp Stacks in Dock Cover Flow in Finder iCal Safari 3 Spaces Time Machine Core Animation Ruby on Rails	QuickTime X Safari 4 Cocoaized Finder Improved performance Exchange ActiveSync Grand Central Dispatch OpenCL Better power management	AirDrop Push Notification Auto Save Auto Correction FaceTime Launchpad Mac App Store Multitouch gestures Resume mode 64-bit exclusive	Notes Messages Game Center AirPlay Mirroring	Multiple display support Tabbed Finder iBooks Maps iCloud Keychain Timer coalescing App Nap Compressed Memory LinkedIn support OpenGL 4.1 OpenCL 1.2	Continuity Extensibility Photos iCloud Drive Mail Drop Family Sharing	Split View Enhanced Mission Control Spotlight intelligence Notes Transit Enhanced Mail Enhanced Photos Enhanced Safari New typography Metal
Release date	3/24/2001	9/25/2001	8/23/2002	10/24/2003	4/29/2005	10/26/2007	8/28/2009	7/20/2011	7/25/2012	10/22/2013	10/16/2014	9/30/2015
Price	$129.00	$0.00	$129.00	$129.00	$129.00	$129.00	$29.00	$29.00	$19.00	$0.00	$0.00	$0.00

• OS X 10.10 Yosemite review
• OS X 10.9 Mavericks review

You can download and install OS X El Capitan, for free, on any device capable of running OS X Yosemite.

• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook (Early 2015 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

OS X El Capitan Window Management

The primary way apps manifest themselves on a graphical user interface is through windows. Windows hold the content and the controls. They can vary in size and position and often there can be multiple tabs per window, multiple windows per app, and multiple apps per workspace. That can make finding the window you need amid all those layers and layouts a challenge. And it's one Apple's been trying to solve on OS X for years.

Exposé, Apple's first attempt to make our windows more manageable, has long since been subsumed by the better organized Mission Control. Dashboard, which provided a separate space for widgets, is all but deprecated now that Notification Center has widgets of its own. Spaces, which provided for multiple desktops, also enabled full-screen apps. Hot corners, which can trigger actions based on mouse movement, have been augmented by multitouch gestures. All of them have their purpose, but not all of them always contributed towards a single, coherent purpose. El Cap hopes to change that.

Find my Cursor isn't strictly windows management but it is new to OS X El Capitan and is something you'll encounter immediately when trying to manage your windows. It's also every bit as strange and genius as it sounds.

We've all stared at our screens at one time or another and rapidly shaken our mouse or swiped across our trackpads in hopes the movement would draw our eyes to the cursor. El Cap makes sure you won't miss it by just as rapidly enlarging the cursor until it's impossible to miss.

Like all great interactive flourishes, it's a natural extension of instinctive behavior, and that's why it works so wonderfully well. Even when you're thinking and fiddling and doing it just for fun.

Full-screen apps came with OS X Lion. It was part of the movement to bring the iOS and iPad experience to back to the Mac—to make things more familiar but to also more focused. It worked for some apps, especially photo and video editors where the content really needs as much space as possible, or text editors where distraction needs to be avoided. It removed the traditional power of the multi-window operating system. It traded one type of productivity for another.

Split View attempts to create a balance. It fills the screen, but with two apps instead of one. In so doing it hopes to retain both focus and flexibility. And not coincidentally, the iPad is doing the same thing in iOS 9.

That Split View, like full screen, is handled at the system level means that it works in a consistent way and consistency, as I'm endlessly fond of repeating, is a customer-facing feature.

You enter the Split View from regular window mode by clicking and holding down on the green button in an app's toolbar. The app then docks to the left or right side of the display. You can choose which one by dragging the pointer to whichever side you please.

Once docked the other half of the screen shows you thumbnails of the other available apps. Click on one and it'll dock on that side. Split View engaged. Don't click on one, and you go full screen.

It would be convenient, and save a lot of back-and-forths, if you could also click and hold on the green button from full screen to go to Split View, but that hasn't been enabled (at least not yet).

By default, Split View takes half the width of the screen but you can drag the border to make it wider or narrower. An app can't be narrower than it's pre-set minimum width nor wider than the minimum width of the app tiled beside it will allow.

You can also easily switch sides by dragging an app's toolbar from left to right or vice versa. You can exit it by hitting the green button again or escape on the keyboard. That makes the app you escaped return to normal window mode, but the other app go full screen. (That's counter-intuitive to me; I'd expect them both to return to normal window mode.)

If you try to put two apps in Split View, and the total of their minimum widths would be greater than the width of the screen, OS X will decline to tile the second app. That shouldn't happen too often, though.

Any standard window that can be resized can be put into Split View. Developers can explicitly make apps available for tiling even if they're not otherwise resizable, or can opt-out of entirely if they don't ever want their app to run that way. So, for example, a calculator can temporarily add extra vertical padding so it can fit in Split View next to another app, or a video editing app can pop up a message saying "not available for split screen" if it can't work that way.

The implementation is thoughtful, bit there are still a lot of rough edges. For example, I can't figure out how to hide the Notes list and just focus on one note, and I can't figure out how to show the Messages list and not be trapped in one conversation. You can sometimes drag to expand and collapse views, but not always, and when in Split View with a wide app you have very little leeway.

There's also no way to quickly change the apps contained in an existing Split View on OS X like there is on iOS. That means you can't just live in it. For example, taking notes persistently on one side while you switch between Safari, Maps, Photos, and more on the other, dragging in everything you want for your vacation planning.

Unless I'm missing something obvious, a standard way to show/hide the list views and switch tasks, would go a long way towards making apps more useful in Split View.

On the iPad Split View doubles your productive potential. On the Mac, it's much more of a middle ground. For those who love the full screen, it's twice the screen to love. For those for whom multi-window drag-and-drop is muscle memory, even twice still isn't enough.

But that's what makes the Mac the Mac. You can have it all and easily switch between full screen, Split View, and good old-fashioned multi-window desktops with ease. Or not, if you prefer only working in one mode. Split View is additive. It's there if you ever want or need it but stays completely out of your way if you don't.

I've been making a point to use Split View for the last four months, especially for this review. I've got Notes on one side and, typically, Safari on the other. I'm not sure how much I'll stick with it. I just love multi-window so much. But as Apple continues to iterate on it, I think a lot of people, especially those who get lost in layers, will come to appreciate it. Split View really does manage to balance more and less, and full screen with fuller productivity.

Mission Control in OS X El Capitan takes everything that's come before, from Exposé to Spaces, and makes it all clearer and easier to both see and understand. It furthers Yosemite's design principles with a flatter look but also creates a flatter experience. Windows appear in a single, quickly scannable layer that respects the position of the workspaces. Apps on the left are on the left, right on the right. That helps keep everything oriented as well as accessible.

A three finger swipe upwards on your trackpad, a tap of the Mission Control key (F3) from your keyboard, or a click of the Mission Control icon with your mouse will still take you right to the main view, just as before. But once you're in Mission Control, you have a new way of interacting with your windows.

The new Spaces Bar labels your current desktops alongside any full screen and Split View apps you may have running. Mouse over the bar, and it expands to thumbnails so you can immediately, visually identify your workspaces, switch between them, and even rearrange and remove them.

There's also a new draggable Mission Control shortcut in El Cap: Just pull any window to the top of the screen, then drag a little more to reveal the Spaces Bar. From there, you can drop the window where you want it, either full screen, onto an existing full-screen app to create a Split View, or onto a new or existing desktop Space. Alas, you can't drop an app onto an existing Split View to replace one of the apps in that Split View, at least not yet.

Dragging straight into Mission Control can be tricky to nail at first. You really need to grab the window, push up on the mouse or trackpad until it hits the menu bar and stops, and then push up again. Once you get it, though, you get it.

It's an incredibly fluid experience, and the new Mission Control succeeds in making the sometimes mixed workspace metaphors—which were already improved in Yosemite—more usable, more coherent system.

OS X El Capitan Spotlight

OS X Yosemite saw an all-new Spotlight design that put Apple's universal search and action bar front-and-center on the Mac. Now, El Cap strives to put it front-and-center in our workflows as well.

As part of that, you can move and resize the Spotlight window now. So if you want to check it while you work, you don't have to worry about it overlaying what you're trying to refer from. It's always exactly where you want it. And it's got more there than ever before.

The suggested results engine, which debuted last year, has been enhanced with several new data sources, including weather, stocks, web video, and sports across MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA, WNBA, college football, college basketball, and many European soccer leagues.

It's much closer to what iOS is offering now as well, which creates a better and more consistent experience for those who use both Apple's desktop and mobile platforms. It also works well, and better than I expected given the potential for collision—similar words used in different ways—on a system as complex as OS X.

Pretty much any time I type, as long as I keep typing enough, I find what I'm looking for.

Critically, you can now access Spotlight using natural language.

That's the same type of interface Siri has been using for years on iOS and it's a far more human way of interacting. Instead of writing SQL or boolean or even type: date: contains: you just type the way you talk. For example: "Documents I worked on this week containing El Cap" tells Spotlight I'm only looking for documents, so don't show me mail or web hits or anything else. "This week" constrains the time period, so I don't see anything older than the last few days, and "El Cap" means I want something with those words in it.

It's the way Siri has always worked for voice input, and I've longed for it to work in text for years. I'd still love Apple's personal assistant to come fully to the Mac—as would accessibility advocates everywhere—but this is a tremendous start.

Thanks to a new CoreSpotlight API, developers can make the content in their apps, including documents, messages, and more, available to Spotlight as well. That means it'll be even easier to find what we're looking for, no matter where it's located. No more opening an app, looking, closing, opening, looking, closing, or hoping to scrap whatever plain text may exist in the file format. Just type and it will appear. At least once developers update to support it.

I've tried LaunchBar, Alfred, and Quicksilver, but none of them ever stuck: Spotlight has always been my go-to. Yosemite made it significantly more functional, but natural language and the new results engine make Spotlight more integral.

OS X El Capitan Notes

Notes has been completely rebuilt for both OS X El Capitan and iOS 9. That means it's no longer the simple, plain Marker Felt text app it was in OS X Lion, but a far more robust, far more capable note-taking system.

As you start typing, your first line can automatically be formatted as a title—if appropriate—and the rest, as the body. (You can tweak this behavior in the preferences pane.) There are other formatting options as well: heading, checklist, bulleted list, dashed list, and numbered list.

Choose a checklist, and you can make and track to-dos right from Notes. It's different than Reminders, which are meant to alert you about activities at specific times or places. These are meant for shopping, packing, or other lists that don't need alerts but do benefit from being grouped together in the context of a note.

You can also quickly bring together important bits of information in Notes, including photos, videos, PDF documents, web sites, audio clips, map locations, Pages documents, Numbers spreadsheets, and Keynote presentations, and more.

Because OS X is a full-on multi-windowing environment, you can drag any support data from any supported app and just droop it right into the note. You can also share them from Safari, Maps, Photos, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and other apps using the standard Share Sheet, when and if that's more convenient.

The ability to do both makes Notes for OS X powerful—you never have to stop what you're doing, find Notes, and add something. You can work from wherever you are.

You can't do sketches directly on the Mac like you can on iPhone or iPad, however. It's a pity, especially with the potential of the Force Touch trackpad's pressure sensitive drawing. Hopefully, that'll come in an update. You can, for now, add sketches from iOS and they'll sync across to OS X.

To keep track of everything, Notes includes an attachment browser. So, if you remember adding something, but not where you added it, you still have a good shot at finding it easily and visually based on photos and video, sketches, websites, audio, and documents.

El Cap's new Notes isn't Evernote or Yojimbo, nor is it meant to be. It's just what the name implies—an efficient way to collect, keep, and find the information that matters to you.

Like I said in the iOS 9 review, I typically use Notes as a live, iCloud-synced clipboard to move text-based content between my Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Now I can keep doing just that but with even more and multiple content types. It's simple, but it's glorious.

OS X El Capitan Safari

Safari began as Konqueror, WebKit as KHTML and, from its roots as the Alexander project, it's become an enormously popular and influential browser even though it's only available on Apple's platforms. Part of that is due to mobile, where other browsers have adopted and even forked Safari's engine. But the rest is due to its focus. Apple has a native platform, so it's not obsessed with cramming native-like functionality into the browser. Instead, it's obsessed with making the browsing experience more private, more secure, and much, much faster.

Anyone who has to open the same handful of websites day in, day out, relishes the idea of keeping those sites easily and always available. And that's just what Safari in El Cap does with tab pinning.

Pin a web page either by grabbing its tab and dragging left until it gets compacted down or by right-clicking and choosing the option. The page gets its own, small, icon-identifiable, re-arrangeable tab on the left. Then it stays there, launch after launch, restart after restart, ready any time you need it or until you decide to remove it.

The pinned site will also always display the exact page you pinned. If you click on a link, that link will open in a new, regular tab. It's a great way to explore without losing your starting point.

I have iMore open all the time, obviously, but I also have several other sites I go to near-constantly—like Apple's developer pages right now. Not having to open new tabs and open those bookmarks every time I re-open Safari might sound like a small thing, but it's a huge time and effort saver.

Mute tabs, on the other hand, is a huge annoyance-saver.

If you've ever been blasted by audio coming out of one of a dozen or more tabs across just as many windows, with no indication which tab it is, you'll love this. Click the audio icon on the right end of the Smart Search field and you can mute whatever single tab is actively playing audio or, if multiple apps are playing, you can mute the current one. Option-click and you can mute all other tabs. Click and hold and you can do both those things as well as get a list of, and selectively choose to mute, any and all tabs playing audio. It's bliss.

Apple originally demonstrated a click-and-hold option to mute all audio. I thought I'd prefer that to the current and other options that ended up shipping. But I don't. Sometimes I do want to mute all audio, and now that does take two clicks instead of one. More often I want to mute all other audio, and not that takes one click instead of two. Having both options might be nice for when I really do want to drop an EMP on all sound but as-is the new functionality is a huge win.

A lot of the same new intelligence that powers Spotlight can now be found in Safari's new Smart Search Bar, including weather, stocks, and sports.

Safari Reader gets a selection of fonts, including Athelas, Charter, Georgia, Iowan, Palatino, San Francisco (more on that later), Seravek, and Times New Roman, and themes in white, sepia, gray, or black. It's great for both accessibility and nighttime reading.

Shared Links now get an extension that mean they no longer simply surface content that appears in your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Weibo timelines. Now developers can push stuff in as well.

Shared Links app extensions work on both OS X and iOS. When the extension is called, the app returns a list of items, including a unique identifier (so items don't get repeated or mixed up), the URL, the publication date (for reverse-chronological sequencing), an optional display name, the title, and the body.

The app's icon gets displayed on the right, and an optional custom graphic can also be specified for the item itself. That way, it's both easy to identify where the link came from and visually differentiate it from other items from the same source.

That's what makes Shared Links app extensions different from something like Reading Lists. It isn't a passive, generalized service that lets you arbitrarily save cleaned up content to read later. It's a proactive service that lets apps suggest specific links to add to your feed in their original form.

Like I said in the iOS 9 review, though, I'm not sure if we really need pushed Shared Links in addition to Reading List and in addition to bookmarks. It feels like something simpler and more unified could take their place. Dynamic bookmarks, perhaps?

Just like iOS 9, OS X El Capitan is getting content blocking extensions as well. I've written a ton about them already, but this bears repeating: content blockers aren't ad blockers. They're designed to block any CSS container or JavaScript code to prevent content from being seen or resources from being loaded. Ads are absolutely the most common and popular type of content that'll be blocked, but the goal here is principally privacy and performance.

Blocking content, especially ads, has been possible on desktop browsers for a while, including OS X and Safari. Traditional blockers, however, were services that the browser consulted at load time. That meant the act of blocking content itself could reduce performance, and information about the page being visited could be collected by the service doing the blocking. In some cases, the blockers themselves could theoretically be worse than the content. Even malicious.

Apple doesn't want that. They don't want to replace heavy CSS and JavaScript with just-as-heavy plug-ins, even on systems where power is plentiful like laptops and the desktops. They simply don't want to replace ad trackers with blockers that track.

Just like on iOS, where content blocking extensions have been getting a ton of attention, they work through a set of rules defined in a JSON file. The rules contain triggers and actions. Triggers determine when the rules get to run and actions determine what happens when they run. For page elements like divisions (div), the trigger can be as simple as encountering CSS class. The action, setting its display property to "none". For scripts, it can be as simple as blocking them from loading. Filtering is handled by regular expression (regex). Rules can even be created that, if the proper conditions are met, negate other rules.

Once the content blocking extension is downloaded and enabled, Safari or compiles the extension's rules into bytecode and applies them whenever it loads a web page. Since developers can provide ways to change rules in the app that contains the extension, in action extensions, and in Settings, developers can notify Safari about updates and have the rules recompiled.

Desktops are so powerful that content blocking on OS X is less about raw performance than it is privacy and taking back control of the browser experience. How it all shakes out, we'll have to wait and see. On a platform that already had content blockers, however, OS X El Capitan's version is better and more secure.

Previously you could AirPlay your entire screen from OS X to AirpLay. Now you can Airplay a single YouTube or other HTML5 video. It's fantastic because you're no longer trapped on the screen you want to watch Just like iOS has done for years, you can now watch one thing while doing something else. Same goes for the new picture-in-picture (PiP) mode as well.

Safari can even stream "premium" content wrapped in FairPlay DRM now. How and where that'll be used will be interesting to see.

Web Inspector has also been given a responsive redesign, with a tab-based interface, type profiler, code coverage mode, paint indicator, and frame rendering track.

There's CSS scroll snapping to keep in-focus content in view during and following scrolling, and there are backdrop filers to get that OS X blur effect on web pages.

I vastly prefer Safari to Chrome. The interface is lighter and cleaner, the power efficiency is far greater, and the experience is simply better for me. I still keep Chrome around as a jail for Flash and Google Docs but for everything else I use and enjoy Safari, and these additions just make it better.

Let Google and Firefox and Opera worry about making the web more native for now. I'm delighted the Safari and WebKit teams and putting just as much energy into making it infinitely more usable on my Mac.

OS X El Capitan Mail

Mail is one of those OS X apps you don't appreciate until you have a bunch of email accounts from different services, and you want to not only see them all in a unified place, but work on them all in a consistent, coherent way. Not in a new-fangled getting-things-done metaphor either, but in a traditional email way, just with all the modern conveniences.

Mail gets the same gestures on the Mac that the app has enjoyed on the iPhone and iPad for a while now: swipe right to mark as read, swipe left to delete.

That same delete behavior is also now available in Messages, Notes, Reading List, and Reminders.

Full screen Mail also draws inspiration from iOS with a multitasking drafts mode that lets you start composing, then tuck the message away, go check, reference, or copy something from another email, drag in photos, documents, and other content, and then keep on going with the message.

It also has a tabbed interface, so you can work on multiple drafts at once without having to Command-~ Rolodex through them.

Data detectors, which have always been powerful, are now even more discoverable—and that includes the new flight information detectors. Instead of hiding inline, waiting for you to mouse over them, they suggest themselves right below the address field—like iOS—and are immediately recognizable and actionable. It's really useful for contacts and events.

Search has also been improved, adding the natural language engine from Spotlight. So, for example, you can enter "this week from Serenity" or "sent to Kevin" and don't have to worry about assembling from:/to: or data ranges.

The IMAP engine now intelligently downloads the most important messages first. Apple claims the engine is up to 2x faster on account setup, allowing you to start reading before the entire message stack gets pulled down.

Setting up a machine as new, I did notice email came down quickly, but I don't keep enough mail unarchived or undeleted for it to make a real difference for me.

I've always been a Mail.app user; having all my mail, all in one place, with a unified inbox is just too compelling to move away from. I have to use Gmail for work, however, and Google has always had an… eccentric IMAP implementation. Mavericks was rough at times; Yosemite pretty good. El Cap is shaping up very, very well.

OS X El Capitan Maps

Apple started doing its own maps in iOS 6 and brought them to the Mac in OS X Mavericks. The company has built on them steadily ever since, and in OS X El Capitan they're adding Transit directions. That means, in addition to walking and driving, you can get step-by-step navigation for buses, trains, and subways/metros.

Transit gets its own, optimized Maps view, which shows the stations and routes you'll need to get where you're going. The app also mixes in walking directions so that you can seamlessly get from one station or stop to another.

Schedules are also fully supported, so you can plan activities not only at both ends but along the way. There are even place cards for stations that show not only schedules, but any known issues with the routes.

Of course, since it's not practical to do step-by-step navigation with a Mac, once you plan your route you can easily send the directions to your iPhone, which also makes them available on your Apple Watch, if you have one.

Because transit is a nightmare of petty municipal fiefdoms that are sometimes reluctant to share what they believe is their proprietary data, coverage right now is limited to a handful of cities. That is, outside China where everything is centralized and unified.)

• Baltimore
• Chicago
• New York
• Philadelphia
• San Francisco Bay Area
• Washington, DC
• Toronto
• Mexico City
• London
• Berlin
• Beijing
• Shanghai
• Guangzhou
• Shenzen
• Around 300 additional Chinese cities

Apple's competitors started earlier and are much further ahead. That means Apple will need to work hard—and smart—to catch up.

My city, Montreal, didn't make the shortlist, but I like I said in my iOS 9 review, I tried out transit in San Francisco while I was there. Maps for OS X did a fine job finding routes and sending them to my iPhone and Apple Watch for navigation on the go.

OS X El Capitan Photos

Photos for OS X was quickly previewed during WWDC 2014, shown off again alongside the iMac with Retina 5K display last October, and launched back in March of this year. That should give a good indication of just how big an undertaking it was. Tied into iCloud Photo Library, it offers ubiquitous access to all your pictures and videos, on all your Apple devices, and through iCloud.com.

The Photos for Mac app itself, while closer to being feature-complete than most of Apple's previous reboots, was still missing a few key features. The OS X El Capitan version aims to fix at least some of that.

There will be editing extensions now—akin to the photo extensions that launched with iOS 8 last year—that let developers add their own filters and editing tools right into Apple's app. They'll be available via the Mac App Store starting this week.

Like on the iPhone and iPad, Apple's PhotoKit frameworks allow the editing extensions to be non-destructive. That means you can use as many as you want, and go back and tweak or remove them at any time.

Because the Mac is the Mac, extensions can be bundled into existing apps or shipped on their own, and they'll be easy to enable and customize in System Preferences.

There's still no "Open in external editor…" for quickly round-tripping to Photoshop or other pixel polishers, at least not that I could find, but there will be the ability to add and edit location information. You can do it for a single photo, a selection of photos, or an entire Moment. Just open the info panel and "Add a Location". Bliss.

It's not just location data that you can batch change either. Titles, dates, times, and Faces are all editable as well. For the latter, just select the photos and drag them into a name in your library. Photos and albums can now be sorted by date and title as well.

While I moved my main iPhoto library over to Photos for OS X back when it went into beta, I kept using Aperture on occasion as well. Though there are still features I'd like to see come to Photos, these updates go a long way to relieving my lingering Aperture needs. There are still holes, still quirks, and still some rough edges, but Photos is getting there.

I don't know if I can give up Photoshop just yet—I've been using it for decades, and it's muscle memory now—but I'm eager to see how close Photos can come to removing everything but pixel editing from that needs list.

OS X El Capitan Performance

Apple has worked to make OS X El Capitan even faster and better-performing. The company claims it launches apps up to 40 percent faster, switches between apps up to 2x as fast, and does things like opening PDF files up to 4x faster. It's tough to test claims like that with a stopwatch because conditions can vary so much between machines, other activity, and app state, but anecdotally large apps do feel like they're launching faster.

And hey, for times when they're not launching or processing fast enough, there's also an all new, all flatter and more modern spinning beach ball to help entertain you while you pass the time. What?

Last year the popular sentiment was that Apple was moving ahead too fast and with too many things, and that software quality was suffering. Everyone has gripes every year, of course, but after a couple years of significant change, pressure clearly built up. There might not have been as many crashers as years past but frustrators in sufficient quantity create feelings indistinguishable from crashers.

Much of that sentiment was piled on the back of discoveryd, the daemon introduced in OS X Yosemite (and iOS 8) to handle unicast DNS resolution, multicast DNS resolution, and Service Discovery. After months of connection eccentricity, Apple recently returned to a version of the venerable mDNSResponder updated to support Continuity and other modern features. And that's what remains in El Capitan.

Ultimately that's a terrific sign. discoveryd certainly wasn't solely responsible for every pain point in OS X, but that Apple's core operating system team was willing to walk it back is good. Good for the platform. Good for customers. And good for Apple.

Metal refers to "writing to the metal", a programming term for accessing hardware in as direct and performance-based a way as possible. Apple debuted it with iOS 8 last year as a way to circumvent some of the more cumbersome aspects of OpenGL—the standardized graphics language framework for games, design, and science applications—used to communicate with the GPU (graphics processing unit).

With OS X El Capitan, Apple has brought Metal to OS X, but they've also made Metal much more powerful. Now it provides a single, unified API (application programming interface) and runtime for both OpenGL and OpenCL—the standard computing language that both leverages the GPU and lets it be used for more general tasks.

Apple has also moved two of the company's essential rendering systems, Core Graphics and Core Animation, to Metal; any developer already using one or both gets all the new performance benefits essentially "for free".

Because Metal optimizes both the CPU and the GPU (integrated and discreet), it reduces overhead and, according to Apple, delivers more than 10x the draw calls per frame, and up to 40 percent higher efficiency.

That translates into more detailed games with better effects; more powerful pro apps for everything from illustration to post-production; and full-on multithreading and multi-core performance for everyone and every thing.

Games using Metal should start shipping this week, but it will likely take months before we see games really optimized for it.

OS X El Capitan Security + Privacy

The Mac doesn't enjoy the same market share as Windows, but for years now it's been growing while PC sales have been shrinking. Apple has also become the biggest and best-known tech company in the world. All of that combines to put a larger target on OS X than ever before.

That's probably why we're seeing more attempts to exploit Apple's computer operating system, and why the company has spent a tremendous amount of time and effort on security enhancements.

With OS X El Capitan, those enhancements take the form of System Integrity Protection (SIP). In essence, it prevents anyone or anything from writing to /System, /bin, /usr (except /usr/local), and /sbin. In other words, it provides a type of root-level protection to the Mac similar to what the iPhone and iPad have benefited from for years.

Code injection and runtime attachments are no longer permitted, though expert users who really want to will still be able to access the system as deeply, if nowhere nearly as conveniently: It involves having to reboot into the recovery partition.

Those who simply buy a new Mac and run as administrator without even thinking about it, however, will be better protected. And that's terrific.

Apple has also added Application Transport Security, which enforces best practices when our data is sent from our Macs to web services. Currently, that's TLS 1.2, but as stronger transports become available, ATS will push everyone towards them as well. It's another terrific security improvement from the folks in Cupertino.

Along with security, Apple has made privacy a top-level feature. In OS X El Capitan, that manifests in the way in which your user data is handled. Since Apple isn't a cloud company, they don't default to saving your information in server space: That means they don't bring our data up to their network; they bring their network down to our data.

Certain things like movies, sports, and Internet search results have to be accessed online because they don't exist on our devices. Other information, like our contacts, calendars, web history, and more, does live on our devices—and never has to leave them.

Likewise, Apple claims that if you opt-in to one of its online services, that data isn't even shared with the company's companion online services.

It remains to be seen whether or not this privacy-first model ultimately affects the features Apple can deliver, but for most, the lower risk of data misuse and abuse—even accidental—will make it worthwhile.

And for those who don't mind having their data stored on the cloud and used to feed web services, OS X El Cap works great with Google as well.

Choice is a good thing.

OS X El Capitan Typography

Lucida Grande had been the OS X system font since 1999, but Yosemite shook that up in 2014 by bringing iOS 7-style Helvetica Neue to the Mac. Now, just a year later, Apple is replacing it with an in-house designed font of the company's own making: San Francisco.

San Francisco is a neo-grotesque sans-serif, like Helvetica and FF Din. SF has two optical sizes: Text and Display. Text is for anything under 20 pt, Display for anything over 20 pt.

Most times you won't have to worry about the difference—the system handles it automatically. If you're doing work in an image editor, however, and want to match the way SF looks on the screen, you'll need to manually change from Text to Display when you go above 20 pt.

There are six weights for Text, both regular and italic:

• Light
• Regular
• Medium
• Semibold
• Bold
• Heavy

Display has nine weights total, adding:

• Ultralight
• Thin
• Black

San Francisco scales beautifully from the tiny 38mm Apple Watch to the enormous 27-inch Retina 5K iMac, managing to be both familiar and distinct, interesting but not distracting, legible and enjoyable.

SF ends up being fresher than Lucida Grande and more distinctive than Helvetica Neue, and it gives something that the Mac should have had for a long while—a look all the Apple's own.

In addition to San Francisco, OS X El Capitan also has a new Chinese system font named Ping Fang. (I think that means "Apple Square," but my two years of college Mandarin might be failing me.)

Ping Fang is available for both traditional and simplified Chinese characters, and carries over Apple's same focus on legibility. It brings a modern look to roughly 50,000 characters—a huge amount—and comes in six weights from ultralight to semibold. There are also matching roman letters and numerals to ensure easy mixed-language use.

Keyboard input for Chinese has also been improved with the addition of an advanced prediction engine, more frequently updated dictionaries, and an expandable candidate window. El Cap also learns the words and phrases—and emoji!—you use most often and stacks them front and center on the candidate window for faster selection.

Even better, writing Chinese characters on the Mac Trackpad has significantly improved. The software window is now proportional to the hardware size, and you can even write multiple characters in a row.

As someone who found Twin Bridge near-magical a decade ago, I can't wait to work more with all of this.

The Japanese system font, originally designed by JIYUKOBO and formerly called Hiragino Kaku Gothic, is now Hiragino Sans. For El Cap, it goes from three to ten weights. There are also four new Japanese fonts included, both classic and modern, and in two weights each.

Japanese input gets an enhanced vocabulary and improved engine, but it also gets live conversion, which replaces text strings automagically with Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and even Roman words—all in real time. If you've ever seen Siri refine speech-to-text as you continue talking, then imagine that for text conversion. It reduces what used to be a cumbersome, multi-step process into something fast and streamlined.

OS X El Capitan Trackpad

Apple continues to blur the lines between capacitive iOS screen and capacitive OS X trackpad. They remain very different experiences—direct manipulation vs. proxied manipulation—but the gesture language is being unified where it makes sense.

Developers are getting access to new frameworks for table rows, which will let them offer gesture actions akin to Apple Mail's swipe to mark or swipe to delete. The destructive actions get a red color treatment and a longer activation path, to prevent misfires, but both should enable new levels of convenience for the gesture-savvy.

Spring loaded controls, which used to be restricted to popping over folders when you hovered over them long enough, now work with a variety of interface elements. And if you have Force Touch trackpad and dislike waiting, you to force click to trigger the springs immediately. Since time-based interactions never feel as satisfying as directly triggered interactions, it provides the opportunity for a perceptively faster and more satisfying experience.

It's opt-in for developers, but since it can be enabled by checking a Spring Loaded button in Interface Builder, hopefully the simplicity of adoption will aid in the velocity of adoption.

Accelerator controls, and multi-level accelerator controls, let all kinds of buttons react to the amount of pressure you use when you click. The standard accelerator controls are linear. So, for example, the harder you press the bigger your brush becomes, nicely and smoother. The multi-level accelerator controls are incremental. So, for example, the harder you press the further along the 2x, 5x, 10x, 30x, and 60x fast forward speeds you move. Multi-level defaults to two stages but developers can set it higher.

There are also momentary accelerator controls, like zoom in Maps, and continuous accelerator controls, like in Photos. More pressure equals more speed through the photo sequence. The former controls the amount of change, the second the frequency. Again, developers can opt-in with a check box.

Pressure was added to the event stream options to support the new Force Touch trackpad in the MacBook and MacBooks Pro. For developers who prefer to use the responder approach, Apple has a new responder method that provides pressure changes as well.

Apple is doing a lot to measure which finger or thumb is being used and how much pressure is being applied to provide a consistent, normalized experience. So, instead of just providing raw data to developers, they're providing post-processed indicators of change. We'll have to see how well it works when apps start to ship with the new features enabled. Like with any new technology, though, it might take some time for everyone to figure out the best approaches.

There's alignment feedback to provide haptic feedback for snapping objects into place along the horizontal axis, vertical axis, or both. So if you want to align two screenshots in an annotation app, for example, you can get a tap to confirm they're perfectly straight. And because it's consistent across apps that implement it, it means it's something you can learn to feel and rely on.

Apple is also providing a way to configure the primacy of interactions for the trackpad inside apps. That way clicks, deep clicks, deep drags, and other interactions can only occur when appropriate. For example, if you're drawing and press to get a thicker line, you don't want a force click to register.

None of this is meant to be all up in your finger tips. It's meant to be subtle. A hint, not a hammer.

If you have one of Apple's new Force Touch Trackpads—currently available on the new MacBook and 2015 versions of the MacBook Pro—then you're in for a treat with OS X El Capitan.

Both AppKit—the framework developers use to build Mac apps—and WebKit—the engine underlying Safari—get new APIs for interacting with Force Touch. That means both apps and web pages will be able to provide precise pressure sensitivity for input as well as haptic feedback from the Taptic Engine.

We'll have to wait and see how it all gets implemented, but the potential is beyond exciting.

Miscellaneous

There's a lot more going on with OS X El Capitan under the hood. While many of these may seem to be developer-specific features and technologies, all of them will result in better apps for everyone. What's more, they once again show how Apple not only continues to build on the foundation of Continuity and Extensibility, introduced last year, but continues to bring both OS X and iOS into alignment.

OS X and iOS remain two distinct operating systems with common foundations, but increasingly they're moving in a common direction as well.

Audio unit extensions create a modern architecture for audio plugins. On iOS, it's a first. On OS X, it's a latest and greatest. It means audio plugins can now be packaged into apps and made available on the Mac App Store just like the new Photo extensions.

Network extensions include Wi-Fi hotspot helpers, personal VPN managers, and custom Enterprise VPN servers. With them, instead of having to manually launch an app to manage networking, extensions can be called by the system when and as needed.

While OS X doesn't seem to be getting ReplayKit to record and share games, it is getting GameplayKit and Model I/O to make building games for the Mac easier than ever.

In addition to bringing Metal to the Mac, Apple is also bringing TextKit, the company's dynamic type system. UICollectionView—a way of laying out apps—is coming to OS X as NSCollectionView, and NSStackView is debuting alongside its iOS counterpart. There are also improvements to AutoLayout, Apple's constraint-based design system, including guides and anchors. And there's a new contact framework shared between OS X and iOS.

All of these not only make modern apps easier to build but provide for a consistent methodology between OS X and iOS. Apple may not believe the Mac and iPad should merge, but they do believe developers should be able to do similar things on both platforms in similar ways.

It's not only efficient; it's effective.

• OS X El Capitan help guides
• OS X El Capitan discussion forums

The Bottom Line

El Capitan translates to "The Captain" or "The Chief" and represents the heights of Yosemite. OS X El Capitan aspires to the same. It takes everything that was great about 10.10 and tries to make it better for 10.11.

If you've got software that's not yet updated to support OS X El Capitan, especially production software on production equipment, wait as long as you have to before upgrading. If you want to avoid the crowds and any last minute surprises, wait a couple days or a week.

I've been running it since the first beta on my MacBook Pro and with the gold master, I put it on my iMac as well. It's been working great on both and, given the improvements to security alone; it would be in everyone's best interests to upgrade as quickly as possible.

Based on both popular sentiment and the narrative from the last year, it's clear that following a series of redesigns and re-architectures, everyone needed a moment to settle and breathe again. A "Snow Leopard moment". El Cap gives us that, but like Snow Leopard it also gives us much more.

It moves the Mac forward, not by the leaps and bounds of some previous years, but steadily and surely.

• iOS 9 review
• watchOS 2 review

Whether you've been using the OS X El Capitan beta since its early days or you're still on OS X Mavericks, you should start to think about getting ready for the official OS X release. Barring any problems, El Capitan should appear tomorrow on the Mac App Store as a free update; it'll likely run about 4-6GB in size. Want to prepare for the update so that it goes as smoothly as possible? Here's what you need to do.

And if you still have questions about OS X El Capitan, here's a quick link to our FAQ:

• OS X El Capitan FAQ: What you need to know!

Step 0: Is my computer eligible for OS X El Capitan?

Any Mac on the list below can run OS X El Capitan.

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

This is the same grouping of computers that supported OS X Yosemite (10.10), OS X Mavericks (10.9), and Mountain Lion (10.8); if you were eligible for any of those updates, you're eligible for OS X El Capitan!

And if you're running an older version of OS X, don't sweat: You can directly upgrade to El Capitan from versions as ancient as OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). Just open up the Mac App Store on download day and get the installer.

Step 1: Make sure you're not going to break your apps

If you have an application you rely on for work or daily use, it's good to check with the developer (either on their website, via Twitter, or directly) to make sure their app will play nicely with OS X El Capitan. There are a few under-the-hood system tweaks that could break software that relies on system administration access, as well as small changes that may make your apps buggy. If the developer for the app you use isn't supporting El Capitan or hasn't released an update yet, you can continue to use OS X Yosemite without fear—the system will still be fully supported by Apple, and you'll get security updates and the like. (If you really want to play with El Capitan, you can also make a system partition to run those older apps.)

If you have multiple apps you want to check compatibility with, RoaringApps has an excellent database for such things.

Step 2: Clean up your Mac

OS X Yosemite was a 5.72GB install, and it's a good bet that OS X El Capitan will land somewhere in that vicinity. As such, you'll want to have at least 10GB free—5 for the install, 5 for overall system speed. If you're tight on hard drive space, there are a few good places to check: the MobileSync folder (which holds iOS backups) is a common culprit, as is the Downloads folder. If you don't want to go rooting around your files, however, I recommend using a utility like DaisyDisk, which automatically helps you find pesky space-hogging files.

Even if you don't need to make space on your hard drive, a new OS X update is a great excuse to clean up your Desktop, empty your Downloads folder, and get rid of any lingering items in your trash.

Step 3: Make a backup

With any luck, you already have your computer on a regular backup routine. But yes, you should absolutely make a backup before upgrading to OS X El Capitan. While it's very unlikely that upgrading your software will damage or delete your data, it's always smart to keep a spare copy of your information handy in case of emergency. If you don't have Time Machine set up, you can also back up through Dropbox, Crashplan, or a local service like Carbon Copy Cloner.

Side-note: If you're using the OS X El Capitan Public or Developer betas

If this year's iOS beta is any indication, you'll be able to upgrade to the shipping version of OS X El Capitan from the Mac App Store when it arrives on September 30. Just visit the Mac App Store and look for the OS X El Capitan banner.

If you've partitioned your drive in order to install El Capitan somewhere where it wouldn't meddle with your primary system, you've got two tasks in addition to the traditional "back up your primary system" advice.

First: Make sure you've synced any important data you've been using on that partition to either your main partition, Dropbox, or a backup hard drive. This way, you don't have to switch partitions constantly to try and rescue any old data floating about on your test drive.

Second: Decide whether you're keeping this partition around or getting rid of it. If you have a large hard drive, it's not the worst idea in the world to have a spare partition around, especially if you're the sort of person who likes to test beta software. If you're hurting for space on your primary partition, however, and your OS X testing was a temporary measure, you might instead want to trash your test partition.

• How to remove your test partition

If you're part of Apple's Developer program, you may have already gotten a prompt to install OS X 10.11.1, the next shipping version of El Capitan. If you want to downgrade back to El Capitan, you may be able to just run the 10.11.0 El Capitan installer, but there's a possibility you may have to back up, erase, and reinstall the OS on your machine. (This is one of several very good reasons to have a partition on your computer for OS X betas, rather than your main shipping system.) We'll update as we know more tomorrow.

Questions?

Let us know in the comments.

If you've recently upgraded to iOS 9, you may find that you can no longer sync your beautiful new Notes app with your Mac. This is because on OS X Yosemite, your Notes app is still the same sad, pre-attachment version that you had in iOS 8—and they can't talk to each other.

Good news: OS X El Capitan has an iOS 9-compatible Notes app. Bad news: OS X El Capitan doesn't ship until September 30.

But don't worry, friends: You don't have to rush to install the OS X El Capitan beta if you're relying on getting your notes from iOS to OS X. Instead, you can use iCloud.com for your syncing needs. Unfortunately, this does only talk from iOS 9 to iCloud.com—so you'll have to do your notes-writing in one of those two places, and leave the OS X Notes app alone until you upgrade to OS X El Capitan.

Note: This only works for Notes you're syncing through iCloud.com; if you're syncing them through a different service, you won't be able to see them.

How to view iOS 9's Notes on a Mac running OS X Yosemite

1. Open Safari on your Mac.
2. Visit iCloud.com and enter in your username and password.
3. Click on the Notes app.
   
   

From there, you should be able to edit your current notes, add checklists and text, and delete any unwanted information.

The OS X El Capitan public beta is a way to test the next generation of Mac software. If it turns out you don't enjoy the process, or would prefer to wait and try again later, you can go back to OS X Yosemite. Downgrading is a simple process, but it's also a bit of a chore. Don't worry, though, we'll walk you through it!

Note: If you're reading this article on the Mac you want to revert, either print it out first, or open it on iPhone, iPad, or another Mac so you can read along as you go.

If you made a bootable OS X Yosemite install drive before you went on the El Capitan beta, then simply plug it in, reboot, hold down the Option key, and you'll be on your way.

If not, you'll need to erase OS X El Capitan first, and then re-install.

• How to erase OS X El Capitan
• How to reinstall OS X Yosemite
• How to restore your data from Time Machine

How to erase OS X El Capitan

1. Make sure your Mac is connected to the internet over W-Fi or Ethernet.
2. Go to the  menu and select Restart....
3. Hold down Command+R while your Mac reboots.
4. Click on Disk Utility in the OS X Utilities selector.
5. Click Continue.
   
   
   

6. Select your Startup Disk.
7. Click on the Erase tap.
8. Type in Macintosh HD for the name (or whatever you like.)
9. Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled)* from the **Format list, if it isn't selected already.
10. Click Erase.
    
    
    

Once it's done, quit Disk Utility and get ready to reinstall.

How to reinstall OS X Yosemite

1. Click on Reinstall OS X in the OS X Utilities selector.
2. Click Continue on the OS X Yosemite Installer.
   
   
   

From this point on it's the same as a standard update, simply continue on and agree to the licensing terms as you go. When you're done, your Mac will reboot into OS X Yosemite.

Note: Depending how old your Mac is, you may get an older version of the installer—typically the one that originally shipped on your Mac (That's especially true if you end up in Internet Recovery mode).

If that happens, complete the installation of Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, or whichever version you're offered, and when you're done and rebooted, go to the Mac App Store and re-run the OS X Yosemite update.

How to restore your data from Time Machine

You should be asked if you want to restore from Time Machine as part of the reinstallation process. If not, or if you choose not to, you can restore at any time.

1. Power up or restart your Mac.
2. Hold down Command+R while your Mac boots.
3. Click Restore from Time Machine Backup from the OS X Utilities menu.
4. Click Continue.
5. Read the Restore Your System page and click Continue.
6. Select your Time Machine backup
7. Click Continue.
8. Select the most recent backup of your drive and click Continue.

Your Mac will then restore from Time Machine and reboot. The process can take a while so, depending on network speeds and the amount of data, so be patient.

If you run into any trouble or have any questions, ask away in the comments!

The idea behind two-factor authentication is exactly what the name implies: Your password alone is no longer enough to access your account, you need something else as well. In the case of iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, that something else is a 6-digit verification code transmitted directly to a device you trust and have in your physical possession. So what happens if something goes wrong and you get locked out? What happens if someone tries to hack their way in?

What is two-factor authentication and how does it work?

There are several "factors" that can be used for authentication. A password is "something you know". A fingerprint is "something you are". And a verification code is "something you have". When a system requires only one thing, like a password, it's "one factor" (or "single factor"). When a system requires a second thing, like a password and verification code, it's "two factor" (or "multi factor"). The first is more convenient, the second more secure.

Right now, to access your Apple account (iTunes and/or iCloud) from a new device or web browser, or to do certain things like change your password, all you need to enter in your email address and current password. With two factor enabled, you'll need to enter in your email address and current password, and a 6-digit verification code.

The difference between to the 6-digit verification code and something like your iPhone or iPad passcode—which also changes to 6-digits in iOS 9—is that it can't be remembered. A new sequence of numbers has to be generated and sent to you each and every time you need to enter them.

The verification code can be sent to any device that is already logged into your Apple account (and is therefore "trusted"), and also via SMS or automated voice call to the phone number you register when you set it up.

Unlike your password, however, the 6-digit verification code isn't something you can remember. It's something that will be different each and every time you need to use it, and so it's something that needs to be generated and sent to you anew each and every time you need to use it.

What happens if you can't get your verification code?

Most of the time you'll have an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or non-Apple phone you've signed into or registered with your account and you'll be able to get your verification code if and when you need it.

Also, since you only need it to add new devices (you buy a new iPad, for example), you log in from a new web browser (while on vacation and at an internet cafe, for example), if you wipe a device and need to set it back up from scratch, or if you want to change your password, you shouldn't need a verification number very often.

But if you do need it, and for some reason you can't access a trusted device or registered phone, Apple has a recovery procedure you can follow:

Can someone use the recovery process to socially-engineer their way into my account?

Whenever a account recovery process exists, some people—rightly—worry that it could be abused. For example, that a hacker could call up and con the person in charge of the process into giving them access by rattling off some names or numbers they found using search or social networks.

In this case, Apple specifically points out:

So, by eliminating humans from the communications chain, it looks like Apple has made it extremely difficult for a typical social engineering attack to work.

Where can I get more information on two-factor?

Apple has put up, and continues to update, a support document with all the basic information you need to know. We'll also be covering it in detail when iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan launch this fall. In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions!

As Snow Leopard refined and advanced Leopard, as Mountain Lion refined and advanced Lion, so too is OS X El Capitan intended to refine and advance last year's OS X Yosemite. That means the focus isn't on major redesigns or profound system-level changes, though there is a little of both to be found. Instead, Apple is making OS X smarter, and giving it considerably more polish.

For El Cap, that means new window management options, including an improved Mission Control and new Split View. The company has made Spotlight smarter and improved stock OS X apps like Notes, Safari, Mail, Maps, and Photos. They've enhanced performance, stability, and security—including bringing iOS graphics framework Metal to the Mac. They've even added new system fonts: San Francisco for alphabetic languages; Ping Fang for Chinese; tweaks to the Japanese system font, Hiragino Sans; and improved input methods for both Chinese and Japanese.

I've spent the last week taking a first look at OS X El Capitan on a 2015 MacBook Pro, playing with all the new features coming to a Mac near you this Fall. So, understanding that El Cap is still a few months away from release, how does it all look?

Video first look

Rather watch than read? Hit play and get everything you need to know about OS X El Capitan in 5 minutes!

Split View

OS X Lion brought full screen apps to the Mac; OS X El Capitan will bring a split screen mode for viewing multiple apps at once. Called Split View, you enter the new mode by clicking and holding down on the green full screen button in the app's toolbar. That lets you take whatever app you're working on and dock it to the left or right side of the display.

By default, Split View takes half the width of the screen, but you can drag the border to make it wider or narrower. (Different apps currently allow for different minimum width.) You can also easily switch sides just by dragging the toolbar from one to the other.

I wasn't sure I was going to like Split View, since I usually have a dozen or so apps open at any one time and I enjoy jumping and dragging between them. I've been using Split View almost exclusively to write this first look, however, and it's been working exceptionally well. Text editor on one side, reference material on the other, productivity across both.

Mission Control

In OS X Lion, Mission Control subsumed Exposé on the Mac, bringing multiple desktop spaces and an easier way to manage your windows. Mission Control in OS X El Capitan expands upon these improvements, making it even simpler and easier to both see and understand.

Floating windows are all well and good, but El Cap is furthering Yosemite's design principles with a more-flattened Mission Control view. As such, all your windows appear in a single, quickly scannable layer.

It respects the position of your windows as well, so if an app was on the left side of the desktop, it'll be on the left side of Mission Control. Same for the right side. That helps keep everything oriented as well as accessible.

A three finger swipe upwards on your trackpad, a tap of the Mission Control key (F3) from your keyboard, or a click of the Mission Control icon with your mouse will still take you right to the main view, just as before. But once you're in Mission Control, you have a new way of interacting with your windows.

The new Spaces Bar replaces the window management bar of yore, listing (in label form) your current desktops alongside all currently open full screen and split screen apps. Mouse over the bar, and it expands to thumbnails so you can immediately, visually identify all your workspaces and switch to whichever one you need. From here, you can also rearrange screens and remove desktop spaces.

There's also a new draggable Mission Control shortcut coming to El Cap: Just pull any window to the top of the screen, then drag a little more to reveal the Spaces Bar. From there, you can drop the window where you want it, either full screen, onto an existing full screen app to create a Split View, or onto a new or existing desktop Space.

It's an incredibly fluid experience and makes the sometimes mixed workspace metaphors—which were already improved in Yosemite—into an even more usable, coherent system.

There also a bonus here: Find my Cursor.

We've all stared at our screens at one time or another and rapidly shaken our mouse pointer in hopes the movement would help our eyes lock onto it. El Cap makes sure you'll spot your cursor by rapidly enlarging it until it's impossible to miss. It sounds and looks ridiculous, but it's a natural extension of instinctive behavior and it works wonderfully.

Spotlight

OS X Yosemite saw an all new Spotlight design that put Apple's search and action bar front-and-center on our Macs. Now, El Cap strives to put it front-and-center in our workflows as well.

The suggested results engine, which debuted last year, has been enhanced with several new data sources, including weather, stocks, web video, and sports across MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA, WNBA, college football, college basketball, and many European soccer leagues.

Critically, you can now access all of it using natural language. That means you simply type the way you would talk—"Documents I worked on this week containing El Cap" tells Spotlight I'm only looking for documents, so don't show me mail or web hits or anything else. "This week" constrains the time period, so I don't see anything older than the last few days, and "El Cap" means I want something with those words in it.

It's the way Siri has always worked for voice input and I've wanted it in text for years. I'd still love Apple's personal assistant on the Mac—as would accessibility advocates everywhere—but this is a tremendous start.

You can even move and resize the Spotlight window now, so if you want to keep using it while you work, you don't have to worry about it overlaying what you're working on. It's always exactly where you want it.

Thanks to a new CoreSpotlight API, developers can now make the content in their apps, including documents, messages, and more, available to Spotlight as well. That means it'll be even easier to find what we're looking for, no matter where it's contained.

I've tried LaunchBar, Alfred, and Quicksilver, but none of them ever stuck: Spotlight has always been my go-to. Yosemite made it significantly more functional, but natural language and the new results engine promises to make it integral to the Mac experience. I'm really looking forward to using it full-time come the fall.

Notes

Both of Apple's up-and-coming operating systems — iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan—include a new and improved Notes app. Since Notes's original launch on the Mac as part of OS X Mountain Lion, the app has gone from a simple, plain Marker Felt text app to what's now a far more robust note-taking system.

Now, as you start typing, your first line will automatically be formatted as a title—if appropriate—and the rest, as the body. (You can also tweak this behavior in the settings pane.) There are other formatting options as well: heading, checklist, bulleted list, dashed list, and numbered list.

Choose a checklist, and you can make and track to-dos right from Notes. It's different than Reminders, which are meant to alert you about activities at specific times or places: These are meant for shopping, packing, or other lists that don't need alerts, but do benefit from being in the context of a note.

You can also quickly collect important bits of information in Notes, including photos, videos, PDF documents, web sites, audio clips, map locations, Pages documents, Numbers spreadsheets, and Keynote presentations, and perhaps more.

Notes lets you drag any clippings in, or you can share them from Safari, Maps, Photos, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and other apps using the standard Share Sheet. That makes it far more powerful—you never have to stop what you're doing, find Notes, and add something, you can just send it from where you already are. And it works for both new and existing notes. Seriously.

If you add sketches from your iPhone or iPad using iOS 9, they'll show up as well. You can't yet add sketches from the Mac, though hopefully that'll be added at some point as well. (And yes, the potential for Force Touch drawings makes this feature even more desirable.)

To keep track of all the clips, Notes includes an attachment browser. So, if you remember adding something, but not where you added it, you still have a good shot at finding it easily and visually.

El Cap's new Notes isn't Evernote or OneNote, nor is it meant to be. It's not Vesper either, though it has some of its same charm. It's just what the name implies—a simple and efficient way to collect and find the information that matters to you.

I typically use Notes as a live, iCloud-synced clipboard to move text-based content between my Mac, iPhone, and iPad; I use BBEdit on my Mac for writing and longer work. I don't see myself switching to Notes for my BBEdit work, even with its improvements, but I do see that exact quick-syncing functionality between devices greatly enhanced by the El Cap update.

Safari

Pinned sites: Anyone who has to open the same handful of websites day in, day out, relishes the idea of keeping those sites easily and always available. And that's just what Safari in El Cap does. Pin a website and it gets its own, small, icon-identifiable, re-arrangeable tab on the left. Then it stays there, launch after launch, restart after restart, until you need it or decide to remove it. The pinned site will also always display the exact page you pinned. If you click on a link, that link will open in a new, regular tab.

I have iMore open all the time, obviously, but I also have several other sites I go to near-constantly. Not having to open new tabs and open those bookmarks every time I re-open Safari might sound like a small thing, but it's a huge time and effort saver.

Mute tabs, on the other hand, is a huge annoyance saver: If you've ever been blasted by audio coming out of one of a dozen or more tabs you have open, with no indication which tab it is, you'll love this. Simply click the audio icon in the Smart Search field and it's muted. Blessedly. You can even click and hold to get a list of tabs playing audio and mute an offender without affecting something you do want to listen to. So great.

Speaking of the Smart Search Bar, it gets all the aforementioned enhancements to Spotlight, including weather, stocks, and sports. Developers also build Shared Links Extensions so that they can add their own link suggestions.

Content blocking extensions, by contrast, will let developers make plug-ins that prevent a myriad of different types of code from loading—the most obvious types being ads and Javascript-heavy social network features.

There's also AirPlay to just send the video you want to watch, rather than the entire screen—finally!—and a new Picture-in-Picture (PiP) control.

Safari Reader gets a selection of fonts, including Athelas, Charter, Georgia, Iowan, Palatino, San Francisco (more on that later), Seravek, and Times New Roman, and themes in white, sepia, gray, or black.

Web Inspector has also been given a responsive redesign, with a tab-based interface, type profiler, code coverage mode, paint indicator, and frame rendering track.

I vastly prefer Safari to Chrome. The interface is lighter and cleaner, the battery impact is far lower, and the experience in general is simply better for me. I keep Chrome around as a jail for Flash and Google Docs—so if they start to choke the rest of my browsing doesn't choke with them—so I'm especially excited about these updates.

Mail

Mail gets the same gestures on the Mac that the app has enjoyed on the iPhone and iPad for a while now: swipe right to mark as read, swipe left to delete. (That same delete behavior is also now available in Messages, Notes, Reading List, and Reminders.)

Full screen Mail also draws inspiration from iOS with a multitasking drafts mode that lets you start composing—go check, reference, or copy something from another email—and then not only keep composing, but drag photos, documents, and other content in before you do. And yeah, OS X adds tabs, so you can work on multiple drafts at once without having to Command-~ Rolodex through them.

Data detectors, which have always been powerful, are now even more discoverable. Instead of hiding inline, waiting for you to mouse over them, they suggest themselves right below the address field—like iOS—and are immediately recognizable and actionable. It's really useful for contacts and events. (Flight information has also been added to data detectors, but I haven't personally seen it populate.)

Search has also been improved, adding the natural language engine from Spotlight, as has the IMAP engine which now intelligently downloads the most important messages first. Apple claims the engine is up to 2x faster on account setup, allowing you to start reading before the entire message stack gets pulled down.

I've always been a Mail.app user; having all my mail, all in one place, with a unified inbox is just too compelling to move away from. I have to use Gmail for work, however, and Google has always had an… eccentric IMAP implementation. Mavericks was rough at times; Yosemite pretty good. El Cap is shaping up very, very well.

Maps

Apple started doing its own maps in iOS 6 and brought them to the Mac in OS X Mavericks. The company has built on them steadily ever since, and in OS X El Capitan they're adding Transit directions. That means, in addition to walking and driving, you can get step-by-step navigation for buses, trains, and subways/metros.

Transit gets its own, optimized Maps view, which shows the stations and routes you'll need to get where you're going. The app also mixes in walking directions so that you can seamlessly get from one station or stop to another.

Schedules are also fully supported, so you can plan activities not only at both ends but along the way. There are even place cards for stations that show not only schedules, but any known issues with the routes.

Of course, since it's not practical to do step-by-step navigation with a Mac, once you plan your route you can easily send the directions to your iPhone, which also makes them available on your Apple Watch, if you have one.

Because transit is a nightmare of petty municipal fiefdoms that are sometimes reluctant to share what they believe is their proprietary data, coverage right now is limited to a handful of cities. The El Cap beta includes London, New York, Toronto, and the greater San Francisco Bay Area, with Baltimore, Berlin, Chicago, Mexico City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC expected to launch with the El Cap release this fall.

China, which benefits from standardized and centralized transit data, has 300 cities available in Transit view, including Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.

Since Montreal isn't on the short list, I made sure to try out the transit directions in San Francisco while attending Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). I don't know the city well enough, unfortunately, to offer an informed opinion on how well-optimized the directions were, but they seemed to work fine and were easily understandable and navigable.

Here's hoping more cities get added—and soon.

Photos

Photos for OS X was quickly previewed during WWDC 2014, shown off again alongside the iMac with Retina 5K display last October, and launched back in March of this year. That should give a good indication of just how big an undertaking it was. Tied into iCloud Photo Library, it offers ubiquitous access to all your pictures and videos, on all your Apple devices, and through iCloud.com.

The Photos for Mac app itself, while closer to being feature-complete than most of Apple's previous reboots, was still missing a few key features. The OS X El Capitan version aims to fix that.

There will be editing extensions now—akin to the photo extensions that launched with iOS 8 last year—that let developers add their own filters and editing tools right into Apple's app. (They'll be available via the Mac App Store when El Cap launches later this fall.)

Like on the iPhone and iPad, Apple's PhotoKit frameworks allow the editing extensions to be non-destructive. That means you can use as many as you want, and go back and tweak or remove them at any time.

Because the Mac is the Mac, extensions can be bundled into existing apps or shipped on their own, and Apple says they'll be easy to enable and customize in System Preferences.

There's still no "Open in external editor…" for quickly round-tripping to Photoshop or other pixel polishers, at least not that I could find, but there will be the ability to add and edit location information. You'll be able to do it for a single photo, a selection of photos, or an entire Moment. Just open the info panel and "Add a Location". Bliss.

It's not just location data that you'll be able to batch change either. It'll be titles, dates, times, and Faces as well. For the latter, just select the photos and drag them into a name in your library. (Photos and albums can now be sorted by date and title as well.)

While I moved my main iPhoto library over to Photos for OS X back when it went into beta, I'll admit to still using Aperture on occasion as well. Though there are still features I'd like to see come to Photos, these updates go a long way to relieving my lingering Aperture needs.

Metal

Metal refers to "writing to the metal", a programming term for accessing hardware in as direct and performance-based a way as possible. Apple debuted it with iOS 8 last year as a way to circumvent some of the more cumbersome aspects of OpenGL—the standardized graphics language framework for games, design, and science applications—used to communicate with the GPU (graphics processing unit).

With OS X El Capitan, Apple has brought Metal to OS X, but they've also made Metal much more powerful. Now it provides a single, unified API (application programming interface) and runtime for both OpenGL and OpenCL—the standard computing language that both leverages the GPU and lets it be used for more general tasks.

Apple has also moved two of the company's essential rendering systems, Core Graphics and Core Animation, to Metal; any developer already using one or both gets all the new performance benefits essentially "for free".

Because Metal optimizes both the CPU and the GPU (both integrated and discreet), it reduces overhead and, according to Apple, delivers more than 10x the draw calls per frame, and up to 40 percent higher efficiency.

That translates into more detailed games with better effects; more powerful pro apps for everything from illustration to post-production; and full-on multithreading and multi-core performance for everyone and every thing.

Speaking of gaming, while OS X does't seem to be getting ReplayKit to record and share games, it is getting GameplayKit and Model I/O to make building games for the Mac easier than ever.

Metal for OS X was one of the announcements developers seemed most excited about for El Cap, alongside other improvements like bringing TextKit and NSStackView to the Mac, and UICollectionView—a way of laying out apps—to OS X as NSCollectionView. It's not hard to see why.

Performance

Beyond Metal, Apple has worked to make OS X El Capitan even faster and better-performing. The company claims it launches apps up to 40 percent faster, switches between apps up to 2x as fast, and does things like opening PDF files up to 4x as fast.

For times when things still aren't fast enough, there's also an all new, all flatter and more modern spinning beach ball to help you pass the time.

It's tough to verify those claims with a beta build running on a freshly installed test machine, so I'll wait until the full El Cap review before putting it through its production paces. That said, everything does feel tight and snappy, so here's hoping Apple delivers.

Security

The Mac doesn't enjoy the same market share as Windows, but for years now it's been growing while PC sales have been shrinking. Apple has also become the biggest and best-known tech company in the world. All of that combines to put a bigger target on OS X than ever before.

That's probably why we're seeing more attempts to exploit Apple's computer operating system, and why the company has spent a tremendous amount of time and effort on security enhancements.

With OS X El Capitan, those enhancements take the form of System Integrity Protection. In essence, it provides a type of root-level protection to the Mac similar to what the iPhone and iPad have benefited from for years.

Code injection and runtime attachments are no longer permitted, though expert users who really want to will still be able to access the system as deeply as ever. Those who simply buy a new Mac and run as administrator without even thinking about it, however, will be better protected. And that's terrific.

Apple has also added Application Transport Security, which enforces best practices when our data is sent from our Macs to web services. Currently that's TLS 1.2, but as stronger transports become available, ATS will push everyone towards them as well. It's another terrific security improvement from the folks in Cupertino.

Privacy

Along with security, Apple has made privacy a top-level feature. In OS X El Capitan, that manifests in the way in which your user data is handled. Since Apple isn't a cloud company, they don't default to saving your information in server space: That means they don't bring our data up to their network; they bring their network down to our data.

Certain things like movies, sports, and internet search results have to be accessed online because they don't exist on our devices. Other information, like our contacts, calendars, web history, and more, does live on our devices—and never has to leave them.

Likewise, Apple claims that if you opt-in to one of its online services, that data isn't even shared with the company's companion online services.

It remains to be seen whether or not this privacy-first model ultimately affects the features Apple can deliver, but for most, the lower risk of data misuse and abuse—even accidental—will make it worthwhile.

And for those who don't mind having their data stored on the cloud and used to feed web services, OS X El Cap works great with Google as well.

Choice is good.

Typography

Lucida Grande had been the OS X system font since 1999, but Yosemite shook that up in 2014 by bringing iOS 7-style Helvetica Neue to the Mac. Now, just a year later, Apple is replacing it with an in-house designed font of the company's own making: San Francisco.

San Francisco, a sans-serif font, was first seen in its SF Compact form during the Apple Watch introduction in September of 2014. SF, the non-compact version, debuted just last week on iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan.

Apple has done a ton of work to make SF fit iOS and OS X, including separate text and display versions depending on point size, along with an incredible amount of tweaks to all the glyphs to maximize legibility, and it really pays off.

SF ends up being fresher than Lucida Grande and more distinctive than Helvetica Neue, and it gives something that the Mac should have had for a long while—a look all the company's own.

In addition to San Francisco, OS X El Capitan also has a new Chinese system font named Ping Fang. (I think that means "Apple Square," but my two years of college Mandarin might be failing me.)

Ping Fang is available for both traditional and simplified Chinese characters, and carries over Apple's same focus on legibility. It brings a modern look to roughly 50,000 characters—a huge amount—and comes in six weights from ultralight to semibold. There are also matching roman letters and numerals to ensure easy mixed-language use.

Keyboard input for Chinese has also been improved with the addition of an advanced prediction engine, more frequently updated dictionaries, and an expandable candidate window. El Cap also learns the words and phrases—and emoji!—you use most often and stacks them front and center on the candidate window for faster selection.

Even better, writing Chinese characters on the Mac Trackpad has significantly improved. The software window is now proportional to the hardware size, and you can even write multiple characters in a row.

As someone who found Twin Bridge near-magical a decade ago, I can't wait to work more with all of this.

The Japanese system font, originally designed by JIYUKOBO and formerly called Hiragino Kaku Gothic, is now Hiragino Sans. For El Cap, it goes from three to ten weights. There are also four new Japanese fonts included, both classic and modern, and in two weights each.

Japanese input gets an enhanced vocabulary and improved engine, but it also gets live conversion, which replaces text strings automagically with Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, and even Roman words—all in real time. If you've ever seen Siri refine speech-to-text as you continue talking, then imagine that for text conversion. It reduces what used to be a cumbersome, multi-step process into something fast and streamlined.

Force Touch Trackpad

If you have one of Apple's new Force Touch Trackpads—currently available on the new MacBook and 2015 versions of the MacBook Pro—then you're in for a treat with OS X El Capitan.

Both AppKit—the framework developers use to build Mac apps—and WebKit—the engine underlying Safari—get new APIs for interacting with Force Touch. That means both apps and web pages will be able to provide precise pressure sensitivity for input as well as haptic feedback from the Taptic Engine.

We'll have to wait and see how it all gets implemented, but the potential is beyond exciting.

Coming this fall

El Capitan translates to "The Captain" or "The Chief" and represents the heights of Yosemite. OS X El Capitan aspires to the same. It takes everything that was great about 10.10 and tries to make it better for 10.11.

While only now in its first beta, and not set to ship until this fall—which, if Apple holds to the same pattern as the last two years, means October—El Cap's inspiration and ideas are solid.

Based on both popular sentiment and the narrative from the last year, it's clear that following a series of redesigns and re-architectures, everyone needed a moment to settle and breathe again.

El Cap provides that, but in a way that still moves the Mac significantly forward. I can't wait to use it in its final form come the fall.

Editing by Serenity Caldwell.

OS X El Capitan ships this fall but is already in beta. With it comes Apple's Metal framework which will help the Mac display graphics faster by reducing processing bottlenecks. The question is, which Macs will support it?

Metal was first introduced on iOS 8 in 2014, and at WWDC 2015 Apple announced Metal for OS X. Metal makes the Mac's main processor and its graphics system work more efficiently together. This boosts high-performance apps like games, photo software, video editing. Graphics-heavy programs should benefit greatly once El Capitan is out.

Metal streamlines developers' access to the graphics processor in the Macintosh, reducing the amount of time the Mac's CPU spends doing work related to graphics, so it can do more. The net result is dramatically improved graphics performance: A Mac running Metal can draw objects on the screen up to ten times faster than without.

Unfortunately, not every Mac running El Cap will see a Metal boost. During a "What's new in Metal" session at WWDC, Apple announced that Metal support in OS X extends to Macs built since 2012.

If you're not sure how old your Mac is, go to the  menu and select About This Mac. The Overview tab should indicate the age and model of your Mac.

Mac models made since 2012 include:

• MacBook 12-inch (Early 2015)
• MacBook Air 11-inch (Mid 2012 and later)
• MacBook Air 13-inch (Mid 2012 and later)
• MacBook Pro 13-inch (Mid 2012)
• MacBook Pro 13-inch Retina (Late 2012 and later)
• MacBook Pro 15-inch (Mid 2012)
• MacBook Pro 15-inch Retina (Mid 2012 and later)
• Mac mini (late 2012 and later)
• iMac 21.5-inch (Late 2012 and later)
• iMac 27-inch (late 2012 and later)
• iMac Retina 5K, 27-inch (late 2013 and later)
• Mac Pro (Mid 2012)
• Mac Pro (Late 2013)

That includes graphics hardware made by Intel, Nvidia and AMD. Intel's integrated graphics hardware is used extensively throughout the Mac product line, while discrete Nvidia and AMD graphics processors are used on some systems like some 15-inch MacBook Pros, higher-end iMacs and the Mac Pro.

It's worth noting that Apple has not posted system requirements for El Capitan on its web site yet, though right now the developer beta runs on all Macs that were compatible with OS X Yosemite when it came out last year — that includes Macs that were manufactured in 2008.

There'll be plenty of reasons to install El Capitan on older Macs even if you don't get the benefit of Metal support: Features like Split View, an improved Spotlight, improved Safari, Mail and Notes, easier to use Mission Control and much more.

The list of Macs that can run the OS X El Capitan beta should look familiar to anyone who's put Yosemite on their Mac. Obviously these system requirements could be subject to change, but right now the list of machines is the same.

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

El Capitan will feature a number of enhancements aimed at improving performance and efficiency. A new split screen mode makes it easier to view multiple apps at once while Mission Control lets you find open and access open apps faster than ever. Spotlight adds better natural language searching. Mail, Apps, Safari and other key apps gain enhancements, as well.

You can read all about them in our OS X El Capitan First Look.

The preview version is currently in the hands of Mac developers. Apple plans to release a public beta version for registered users of its AppleSeed program sometime in July. General release is slated for later this fall.

](/wwdc-2015)

The WWDC 2015 keynote started off with a fun little sketch by Bill Hader and a handful other other notable comedians pretending to prep a big show. Tim Cook took the stage to talk about how many attendees were coming from around the world, and the sessions they'll be offering.

OS X El Capitan

First was OS X 10.11 named El Capitan coming this fall and available to developers as beta today. New touchpad gestures allow for easily marking e-mails as read, Safari tabs can be easily pinned and muted, Spotlight search has been in enhanced, new window management is available with Split View, and there's a new notes app (more on that later).

OS X El Capitan developer preview available today, public beta in July{.cta.large}

Apple brings Metal to the Mac, bringing graphics down to the chip{.cta.large}

OS X El Capitan will bring enhancements to Mission Control and window management{.cta.large}

Spotlight gets contextual search and more in OS X El Capitan{.cta.large}

Safari in OS X El Capitan will allow for sites to be pinned to the tab bar{.cta.large}

On top of experience improvements, there's significant progress in performance. The Metal technology used on iOS devices will be available on Mac to reduce processor load for graphics rendering, both mundane and high-demand. This cuts out OpenGL and allows game developers to optimize for Mac at an unprecedented level. The new Unreal Engine plays nice with Metal.

iOS 9

The WWDC keynote then moved on to talk about iOS 9, including improvements in foundation, intelligence, apps, and more. iOS 9 enters public beta in July, will be a free update in the fall, and won't be dropping support for any devices.

Apple officially unveils iOS 9 at WWDC

iOS 9 beta goes to developers today; public beta coming in July{.cta.large}

iOS 9's performance boosts focus on efficiency and battery life{.cta.large}

Siri will see an improvement in location-based reminders and proactive assisting, such as predicting incoming calls from numbers not in your address book, easily adding contextual reminders, or offering music to listen to in certain situations. Search now has an API available for developers to get their hooks into, not to mention new kinds of tailored results out of the box. The search presentation closed with a reassurance talking about Apple's dedication to privacy, and affirming that the user is always in control.

Siri in iOS 9 gets a new look and more intelligence{.cta.large}

Apple Pay was next up. New partners are signing up with Apple Pay, including Square with a new reader. 1 million locations will be using Apple Pay as of next month. Apple Pay is big with apps too, getting twice as many checkouts. Pinterest will allow users to buy pinned items with Apple Pay soon. Apple Pay is coming to UK in July with support for many major banks, with more coming in the fall. 250,000 UK locations, including Oyster, will support Apple Pay at launch. Apple Pay is adding store, credit, and debit cards. Passbook has been renamed to Wallet in light of all of the new features.

Apple Pay now being used by 2,500 bank locations in US, will launch in the UK in July

Following Apple Pay, the Notes app was shown off with checklists, photos, drawing, web links, and a new view which highlights attachments. Apple's native Maps app is getting an update too with transit information in major cities in China and the U.S. Maps now has search based on category.

Maps in iOS 9 brings detailed transit maps to the fore{.cta.large}

Add photos, create checklists, draw sketches, and more with Notes in iOS 9{.cta.large}

One of the more exciting iOS announcements was a brand new app called News. Slick transition animations, embedded video, in-line photo galleries, and rich typography are all available. Bookmarks help you pick up where you left off, and suggestions help you find other publications based on your reading habits and manually-entered interests. Major publishers like Conde Nast, ESPN, Wired, and Wall Street Journal are on board. U.S., U.K., and Australia will be the first to get the News app.

Apple introduces News to keep you up to date with your favorite publications

iPad is due for some updates in iOS 9. The QuickType keyboard will have cut, copy, and paste shortcuts, along with a few others up beside your text predictions. A nifty double-swipe gesture allows you to select text without leaving the keyboard. Additional optimization has been made for hardware keyboards.

New multitasking features are coming to the iPad as part of iOS 9{.cta.large}

iPad keyboard gains new shortcut bar, can become trackpad, and more in iOS 9{.cta.large}

Multitasking on iPad is getting a big upgrade in iOS 9. SlideOver is a new feature that lets you swipe in a split view of two apps running at once. Split View is unfortunately only available on the iPad Air 2, though you'll be able to peek at incoming notifications on older devices. A new multitasking interface now shows larger previews of the apps immediately available. Picture-in-picture video lets you shrink, resize, and move thumbnails of videos while you're in other apps. APIs are going to be available for developers to make use of PIP video.

Talk about iOS 9 closed off with a smattering of additional announcements. An extra three hours of battery life are going to be available through a new battery saver mode. Two-factor authentication is coming to iCloud. The over the air update to iOS 9 will only require 1.3 GB of free space, as opposed to much larger historical updates.

iOS 9 brings a variety of developer goodies including GamePlayKit, ReplayKit, and more{.cta.large}

iOS 9 will be a space-friendly update, two-factor authentication coming to iCloud{.cta.large}

Then there was a lot of great stuff for developers. Three new frameworks are going to be available to developers called GameplayKit, Model I/O, and ReplayKit. HealthKit can now monitor hydration and reproductive health. HomeKit is adding support for sensors, window shades, and security, with remote control over iCloud. CarPlay is adding wireless support, and expanded support for car manufacturers. Swift 2 was announced at WWDC 2015, with a bunch of improvements, and will be going open source. iOS, OS X, and Linux compilers will be available in late 2015.

Swift 2 programming language will become open source project by Apple{.cta.large}

CarPlay will be going wireless in future cars{.cta.large}

HomeKit supports remote access via iCloud, wide variety of connected devices

watchOS 2

Tim Cook got back on stage to sum things up, and announce the the App Store has served up 100 billion downloads, has 1.5 million apps available, and paid out $30 billion to developers.

Then there was watchOS 2. The developer beta launched today, and coming to the public in the fall. Apple Pay, Maps, Siri, and Timepiece are all getting improvements on the Apple Watch. Individual photos and albums can be used as faces, alongside new city-based timelapses, and customizable "complication" faces with additional contextual information like weather and upcoming flights.

Apple announces watchOS 2: native apps, more friends, smarter Siri

Apple watchOS 2 Developer Beta available today, public launch this fall{.cta.large}

Apple Watch app creators will be able to put in more native features{.cta.large}

Time Travel comes to watchOS, shows what you have coming up quickly{.cta.large}

Time Travel is a neat new feature that lets you zip forward with the Digital Crown to see how those complications will change, such as which meeting is after your next one. Nightstand mode is a new landscape alarm mode that can kick in while your Apple Watch is charging.

The friends system lets you add buddies more easily and have multiple sets of friends. Digital Touch now supports multiple colors. E-mail will have the ability to to reply, and FaceTime can handle audio now.

Fitness apps can work independently and sync up whenever it restores an iPhone connection. Fitness has some cool new achievements. Apple Pay on Apple Watch includes the membership cards we'll be seeing in iOS 9. Transit directions on maps will be there complete with Siri commands. Siri will also support home control over your Apple Watch.

For developers, app logic will be able to run natively on the watch, without needing to rely on your iPhone. Developer access to audio and video playback will be available on watchOS 2, plus HealthKit, HomeKit, accelerometer, microphone, Taptic Engine and the Digital Crown.

Apple Music

Tim Cook came back on again for "one more thing", which was Apple Music. Apple Music aims to tie together video, audio, and social into a unified service. It comes out June 30 in over 100 countries for $9.99/month, or $14.99 for a family up to 6 users. The first three months will be free, and the app will be coming to Android later alongside a new version of iTunes.

• Apple Music is official with on-demand streaming, a global radio station, more
• Apple Music coming June 30 for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Windows

Jimmy Iovine took the stage to introduce the service, and Trent Reznor appeared on video talking about his creative involvement. In addition to on-demand streaming of iTunes music is a 24/7 radio station based out of three cities called Beats One. There's also a curation section of the app that allows you to view songs suggested by Apple's human musical experts. Drake took to the stage to introduce the Connect feature in Apple Music, followed by Eddy Cue who did a walk-through of the app.

The show closed off with a concert by The Weeknd. That's about it, but be sure to read up in more detail on all of the announcements below!

Microsoft's Jerry Nixon raised eyebrows at the company's Ignite conference recently. He said that Windows 10 "is the last version of Windows.". Microsoft may be on to something, and I'm wondering how well it would work for the Mac when it comes to OS X 10.11.

Nixon doesn't mean that Microsoft has any plans to cancel Windows or do something else radical with it. Instead, he's talking about Microsoft's plans to evolve Windows as a service, rather than as a monolithic operating system update.

Microsoft plans to update Windows incrementally with new features and services rather than force a major disruption every few years when it comes out with a major new release.

Many of Windows 10's major components are designed modularly, to be replaced with new technology. This iterative design approach should make it possible for Microsoft to innovate and test new features more rapidly than it's been able to in the past. What's more, Microsoft's new operating system will work similarly across desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.

Given the resistance and outright antipathy many consumers and businesses have shown Microsoft's recent releases, this new approach may make a lot of sense. Once they've transitioned to Windows 10, they'll be ready to take advantage of new features and functionality as Microsoft is ready to roll them out. Microsoft is trying to make it as painless a transition as they can by giving it away to legitimate users of previous releases, a page they've borrowed from Apple's playbook.

Beginning with the release of Lion, Mac OS X 10.7, Apple adopted an annual upgrade cycle, and they made the new OS free. Mac users have upgraded to new releases in large numbers ever since. In fact, Yosemite has been Apple's fastest adoption yet. So you can argue that Apple has nothing to gain by taking a more iterative approach — that its current system works just fine. And you might be right.

Given that, should Apple consider Microsoft's "last OS ever" approach?While Mac users have adopted new OS X releases in large numbers, there certainly have been some growing pains. I've talked before about some of the issues that Yosemite users have had, like unreliable Continuity features, trouble with new networking technology, and more.

An incremental, iterative approach might give Apple an opportunity to introduce new technology more gradually. Would that cause fewer problems for users, administrators, and developers, or would it be an even bigger headache?

Apple's not afraid to cause short-term discomfort for long-term benefit. Just look at Apple's app development efforts: Final Cut Pro users were furious with Apple when it went to Final Cut Pro X because it removed or changed functionality. It's done the same with iMovie. It's done the same with iWork apps like Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.

At least when it comes to Apple, it's dangerous to assume that past behavior is a good indicator of future action. So I wouldn't make any assumptions based on Apple's track record thus far.

I'm willing to bet that Apple is taking a very long look at what Microsoft is doing with Windows 10. And Apple is surely ready to adapt and change if it looks like it's the right move.

Now, in fairness, I don't do any really high-resolution scanning. For me scanning is pure utility: Needing to legibly digitize real-world documents. But it's an evolution. And so much of how we use our devices is about evolution.

Even a couple of years ago, having a scanner was a core requirement of whatever printer I was shopping for. I still have that printer — a multifunction device that scans, prints and faxes. But for the occasional page printed, it doesn't see a lot of action these days.

Now I use Scanner Pro from Readdle to scan documents. The iPhone 6's camera was so good, and Scanner Pro worked so well with my workflow, that the switch happened pretty seamlessly. All of a sudden, one day, I was scanning using Scanner Pro.

At this point I suspect my next printer — if I have to buy another printer — isn't going to need scanning in order to be worth my while. The iPhone and the App Store have filled that need differently, and more effectively.

It makes me wonder what else I won't be doing on my Mac in a few years. Not that I'm worried about it, mind you. But I am curious about the evolution of mobile and desktop operating systems, and the constantly shifting and changing landscape of features, functionality and workflow.

In just a couple of months Apple will give developers the first look at what's to come in OS X and iOS when the tribe gathers in San Francisco for WWDC. Many of us are banking on this being a rebuilding year: That Apple will take a step back from top-loading a lot of new features and interface changes in favor of tightening up the sometimes bulging seams of its current platforms.

I assume that no matter what happens, we will have to adapt somehow. That it won't be 100 percent smooth. But I'm confident that in the end, we'll be better off than where we are today, because we always are.

Rumors surfaced this week that production of the Apple Watch has been hampered by low production yields of the Taptic Engine, the force touch technology inside the Apple Watch. Apple's supplier is having trouble making parts that work in large enough quantities for Apple's needs. There's no indication that a large quantity of faulty Taptic Engines are in the hands of any actual Apple Watch customers: The low yield rates are affecting production, if anything.

I didn't get in an order in for my watch until the early hours of Friday morning. What's more, I want the same one as many others: a 42 mm space grey Sport model (to match my iPhone 6, of course). So it's no surprise that my order is backlogged until late May. I hope the Taptic Engine yield problems don't knock that further behind.

Though low production yields weren't the problem when the iPhone 6 debuted — high demand was — Apple soldiered through it and ended up underpromising to many customers and overdelivering: Getting iPhones into their hands weeks before they said they would, initially.

I had hoped that "underpromise and overdeliver" is still standard operating procedure. And indeed, the day my order was placed, it said June, but Apple's since revised it to between May 29th and June 11th. That gave me the faint hope that maybe I'll see mine sooner, rather than later. But if production of the Taptic Engine is indeed the problem, I may remain frustrated still.

Oh well. The Apple Watch is going to be a great device to help me manage health issues, but even then it's a want, not a need. Last time I checked Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs I didn't see "wearable tech" on there, though I guess there's a case to be made for Wi-Fi these days.

One thing I know for sure: Tim Cook's core competency is managing supply chain issues; it's what he did when he was chief operating officer of Apple, and one of the reasons why the company is the most profitable consumer electronics business in the world. Supply chain management is one of the things that has made him such a force within Apple. So I have no doubt that Apple can manage this problem, if there even is a problem.