Apple’s Brand New OS: El Capitan Is A Bit Of A Bummer

Named after one of the mountain peeks at Yosemite National Park, El Capitan will build on Apple’s previous OS X generation, Yosemite, and is basically just a small make-over, rather than anything brand new.

Today was the first day of WWDC, which has the event slogan of “the epicenter of change”,  and Apple started off weak: by introducing the all new Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Named after one of the mountain peeks at Yosemite National Park, El Capitan will build on Apple’s previous OS X generation, Yosemite, and is basically just a small make-over, rather than anything brand new.

One of the cooler features is that now users will be able to multi-task with two windows side-by-side, but even that is similar to Microsoft’s new upgrade. While other updates will also come to mail, spotlight search function, gestures and Safari, they are pretty boring - and honestly, they are literally just updates, hardly even upgrades and certainly not a revolution. Mail will be cleaned up with gestures, so users can swipe to delete messages, Spotlight received more control options, so you can resize the panel and the apps, and Safari will now allow users to mute tabs and pin sites (like bookmarking).

Also new, with the collaboration of Metal, Apple has managed to boost the battery life. It will also allow programs and apps that use a lot of media to run more smoothly - but this too was launched last year during the iOS 8 update.

One of the cooler features is that now users will be able to multi-task with two windows side-by-side, but even that is similar to Microsoft’s new upgrade.

Speed was emphasized - apparently the apps will launch 1.4x faster with the new software, but really, this update is all bug fixing and performance smoothing. It’s unsurprisingly, honestly, because  OS X Yosemite was the most radical change to the operating system since it launched back in 2001.

The update will be become available to the public with a beta release in July and will be downloadable for everyone, for free, this fall.