OS X 10.11 El Capitàn (update 1) Review - Time for a change

Apple has officially released the new OS X version, 10.11, better known as El Capitan, on September 30 and I had the chance to play with it in these days.

Though the name chosen seems to suggest a minor update, which tweaks and improves on top of Yosemite (El Capitan is a vertical rock formation located inside Yosemite National Park), El Capitan brings long-needed improvements and makes OS X more secure.

 
First impressions

The look of the new OS X has been revamped and improved, and so is its performance. 

El Capitan boot time is very fast.

The impact on older Macs, such as mine, is surely slighter, but I believe El Capitan could literally rock on SSDs.

New Features

Safari

1. Pin tabs: You can now pin to Safari the websites you visit more often. If you open a new tab in Safari, you can now right-click it and select Pin Tab (or you can drag it to the left of the address bar). A small icon of the pinned website will be shown on the left of the address bar.
2. Mute sound from a tab: If you have several open tabs and one starts playing sounds, it can be hard to find the culprit. Safari now displays a sound icon next to the tab causing the problem, so you can quickly mute it. Awesome!

System Features

1.  Make your mouse cursor bigger: If your cursor got lost, you can now make it bigger by gently shaking your mouse/trackpad.
   
2. Enhanced multitasking: El Capitàn makes it much easier to snap two windows side by side in full screen, by implementing the so called Split View in Mission Control. You can also drag and drop a window to a specific desktop.
3. Improved Spotlight search: Like I had anticipated in my previous post OS X - Spotlight as a search engine: overlooked feature or revolution? Spotlight's web search features have been enhanced, configuring it like a proper search engine. It's also possible to look for specific emails, filtered out by subject name, date, and more.
4. New Notes features: It's now possible to format text by changing the font, creating bulleted and numbered lists and checklists. You can as well drag and drop images, videos, PDF files and links.
5. Mail new features: If you're composing a new message and minimize it in the process, now you don't need to go to Drafts to resume from where you held off, but only to the bottom of the Mail window. You can also compose multiple message at the same time, while having your Mail window in full screen, by pressing CMD+N.
6. Improved performance: Apple has introduced a graphics technology already featured in iOS, called Metal, that causes applications to load 1.4 times faster. This is a welcome enhancement and, even with older Macs, its impact is very remarkable.

System features

The most important new system feature is the so-called System Integrity Protection (SIP), aka Rootless.

This feature prevents users from modifying critical system folders  (/bin, /sbin, /usr and /System), while only developers can access to /usr/local, /Applications, /Library and ~/Library.

In other words, Apple has restricted the privileges of a typical Unix root user, which induced someone to talk about a rootless system, that's technically incorrect.

The SIP feature prevents user from installing kernel extensions from unidentified developers.

Apple has chosen to further harden OS X, making it very hard for malware to access kernel and system resources, even by using an administrative password.

This feature can be disabled (even though I don't recommend it). 

Check here for more details.

As a result of this new security feature, Disk Utility has been redesigned, by removing Verify/Repair Disk and Verify/Repair Disk Permissions.

Disk Utility now features only a functionality called First Aid, already supported in the previous version.

 

Wrap up

Though OS X El Capitàn can be considered like a minor update (not introducing any remarkable overhaul), it brings important improvements to system performance and to numerous applications, making OS X yet more solid, reliable and user-friendly.

System Integrity Protection (SIP) provides another layer of security to face more severe threat scenarios.

El Capitàn is faster and more reliable than Yosemite and, for both newer and older Macs, it's worth upgrading.

El Capitàn update 1 has made the new Apple OS yet more reliable.