Apple announced OS X 10.11 El Capitan during the 2015 WWDC keynote on June 8. El Capitan’s first beta was released to developers on June 9, and the final version has been released today, September 30, as a free Mac App Store update, ready to be installed on all Macs already running OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

NEW FEATURES	IMPROVEMENTS
COMPATIBILITY	CONCLUSION

An overview of the multimedia applications of Apple's iLife covers the fundamentals of iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand. OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Download file - Install OS X El Capitan 10.11.6.app.zip.

I’ve added the complete list of all Mac models compatible with OS X El Capitan at the end of this review, but if your Mac already has OS X Yosemite you can go on and hit the “Update” button next to El Capitan in the Mac App Store.

After keeping tabs on everything that changed between the first El Capitan beta version until now, I can say that even though I met my fair share of bugs and issues, there haven’t been any outstanding ones that would have prevented my test Macs to be used in production. Moreover, most of the issues I found had to do with OS X applications not being yet fully compatible with El Capitan.

To make it easier for everyone else to get past similar problems, in most cases the problem was the newly added System Integrity Protection El Capitan feature that wreaks havoc among third-party applications by not allowing them to modify a number of files and folders. The good news is that once System Integrity Protection is disabled, most apps will start with no problems and go on about their business like nothing ever happened.

As was the case with the 2009 OS X Snow Leopard release, Apple stopped working on overhauling their operating system’s interface and decided that OS X El Capitan is all about boosting up overall performance and tweaking the interface to provide the user with the fastest possible way of doing things using the same GUI available in OS X Yosemite, with minor changes where they were needed.

My test devices were a Mac Pro with two quad-core processors and 12 GB of RAM, and a dual-core iMac Mid 2007 with 6 GB of RAM to make it easier to pinpoint any difference in performance. From what I’ve been able to see during the test period, the OS X 10.11 performance was pretty much the same in both cases, with obvious differences when running processor-intensive applications in which cases the Mac Pro strolled along unfazed, while the iMac did its best to get the task finished.

OS X El Capitan

The important thing, though, is that each time that happened, the two test computers’ behavior was consistent to what I’ve observed when they were running OS X Yosemite, so having El Capitan installed was not the problem. I must also emphasize that when I say processor-intensive apps, I mean they weren’t applications that one would use on a daily basis, so if you’re not using your Mac for anything unusual, all the apps that you’ll run on El Capitan will buzz along unperturbed.

One of the first changes I noticed after first running El Capitan on the two test Macs, was the cursor call out feature designed to make it simpler to find the mouse pointer and I’m sure that everyone else will do too, seeing that Apple made it quite easy to activate.

The other difference to OS X Yosemite I immediately noticed was the new San Francisco font Apple has also set as the default typeface on iOS and watchOS. Even though it does look quite similar to the Lucida Grande font used in OS X Yosemite, Apple made the change to promote readability and, most probably, a continuous user experience over their entire platform, regardless of the OS each device is running.

The biggest improvement is the launch speed of most apps which, coupled with the easily noticeable snappier Mission, makes the managing apps a lot smoother and effortless. Mission Control especially feels like a whole other beast on OS X El Capitan due to the slightly tweaked look with the desktop previews on top removed and replaced with simple text labels, and the evident boost in performance.

On the whole, after using it from the very beginning after the release of the first beta for developers since the launch of the final version, installing OS X 10.11 El Capitan on your Mac will transform it completely by both changing the way you use it on a daily basis, as well as by adding a sensible boost in speed for most default apps, even though it will look like the same old computer you’ve had on your desk.

Having said this, let’s go through the quite large list of improvements and new features Apple has added on top of OS X Yosemite to obtain the polished OS X El Capitan.

NEW FEATURES

System Integrity Protection

Probably the most prominent new feature added in OS X El Capitan is the System Integrity Protection (also known as rootless), designed to allow the OS to protect some system processes, as well as a number of folders and files from being modified by other processes running on the Mac.

Having System Integrity Protection enabled on a Mac running El Capitan means that even if you can log in as root and run processes using sudo, you will still be unable to modify any of the protected files and processes.

Moreover, System Integrity Protection is enabled by default after you install El Capitan on your Mac, so if you want to have full control over your Mac, the only way to do it is to disable the rootless feature.

San Francisco font

OS X El Capitan comes with a completely new (yet very similar) font named San Francisco, which replaces the old Lucida Grande as the default operating system typeface.

If it seems familiar, that is because you’ve already seen it in Apple’s other operating systems, iOS 9 and watchOS, where San Francisco is also the default font.

If you haven’t noticed any difference after first seeing El Capitan’s interface, you won’t be able to notice it afterwards because San Francisco is pretty much the same font as Lucida Grande with some tweaks to make it slightly easier to read on both mobile and desktop devices.

Auto-hide menu bar

The new OS X release makes it simple to also hide the menu bar if you need more screen estate, not only the Dock. This works pretty similar to when the Dock is hidden: when the auto-hide mode is enabled, the menu bar goes away on its own, and it will only appear again if you hove the mouse pointer to the top of the screen.

Enabling auto-hide for the menu bar

Copy resume in Finder

The finder has also received a new feature: a much-awaited and quite useful copy resume feature designed to make it simpler to continue copying or moving files from one folder to another even after you’ve shut down your Mac midway on purpose or accidentally.

Shake to locate the mouse pointer

If you have a display with at least a full HD resolution, you know very well that your mouse’s pointer is one of the hardest things to hunt down in the swarm of windows you have opened on your desktop.

However, after installing El Capitan, this will pop up on its own: the mouse pointer will automatically zoom in-and-out when you shake the mouse, allowing you to locate anywhere on screen.

The mouse pointer zoom feature

Even though I considered it just a gimmick and quite annoying at first, I got used to it while using El Capitan for a couple of weeks and I re-assessed my opinion, realizing that I’ve been triggering this little gem of a feature, on and off, at least a dozen times a day.

However, if you don’t like it or you find yourself activating it by mistake, the mouse pointer zoom feature can be disabled by going into OS X’s System Preferences, in the Accessibility preference pane, the Display tab and unchecking the “Shake the mouse pointer to locate” option.

IMPROVEMENTS

The fact that OS X El Capitan is a release mainly focused on refining the user experience and boosting the overall performance translates into a slew of improvements, more or less visible to the end-user.

Metal support

Apple's Metal graphics API is probably the

Garageband For Os X El Capitan