OS X El Capitan vs Yosemite

The updates in El Capitan compared to last year’s Yosemite release must count amongst the most minor of any update of OS X, stretching right back to when OS X was introduced in 2000. In fact, you’ll often have to look closely to see much difference. However, the new features are there and some of them are extremely welcome, as we discover in this comparison of the beta of El Capitan and Yosemite.
READ: How to get on the OS X 10.11 El Capitan public beta | Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan launch date | Mac OS X El Capitan preview | Mac OS X Yosemite review | Read our comparison of Windows 10 and Yosemite here

Performance in El Capitan vs Yosemite

Spotting performance improvements between versions of OS X is increasingly difficult now that Apple almost universally utilises solid state storage across its Mac range. Tasks like launching apps occur near-instantly.
Despite this Apple says that apps in El Capitan will load apps up to 1.4 times faster and switching between apps will be twice as fast. Our tests were inconclusive – BlackMagic’s Disk Test and GeekBench produced identical results on both operating systems – but we strongly suspect Apple’s achieving the claimed speed-ups by disk cache optimisation, and benchmarking apps are specifically designed to avoid taking this into account. We’re also aware that El Capitan a beta, so our results are unscientific at best, and the benchmarking apps haven’t yet been optimised for El Capitan either.


Our brief and very unscientific benchmark tests showed absolutely no performance difference between Yosemite and El Capitan, which is of course only a beta right now.
On a subjective level it felt like El Capitan ran like greased lightning on our 2015 MacBook Pro. Compare that to Yosemite: Since its introduction many Mac users have been painfully aware of lags and slowdowns, such as stuttering animations and network connectivity issues. We experienced nothing like this in El Capitan.

Look and feel in El Capitan vs Yosemite

OS X El Captain’s user interface uses a variation of the San Francisco font (and there are indeed several variations — see this fascinating video) that was introduced with the Apple Watch and also features in iOS 9. San Francisco is much more Retina-friendly compared to both Yosemite’s use of Helvetica Neue, or the use of Lucida Grande in earlier releases of OS X.


The new San Francisco system font look terrific, especially on Retina screens where Helvetica Neue/Lucida Grande always looked a bit ropey
Incidentally, San Francisco is not available to use as a font in your documents – you won’t find it via the Font Book app or even in the system Fonts folder. Apple’s hidden access to it (and will continue to hide it) because San Francisco simply wasn’t designed for print/DTP use. It exists solely to define the look and feel of Apple products.
The colour pinwheel cursor that occasionally (cough, cough) appears to indicate OS X is too busy to interact with the user has been overhauled and given the same flatter yet colourful appearance as the new OS X look introduced with Yosemite. It’s a small but welcome tweak and – combined with the new system font – underscores the fresher, contemporary feel introduced with Yosemite. The new cursor is also a lot easier to spot on a busy desktop.
Force Touch trackpad support was introduced with Yosemite and in El Capitan there’s an additional setting within the Trackpad pane of System Preferences to deactivate the click noise. Referred to as Silent Clicking, this somehow doesn’t compromise the degree of feedback, which is still handled via the Click slider.


Silent Clicking is a new feature on El Capitan when it’s used on a MacBook with Force Touch, and magically makes clicking virtually silent – but without compromising feedback
The El Capitan menu bar can now autohide via a setting in the General pane of System Preferences, in the same way that that the Dock can dive out of the bottom of the screen in Yosemite and earlier releases of OS X. If you’ve used Full Screen mode in Yosemite then you’ll already have experienced this feature but now it can be used all the time to gain a precious few centimetres of desktop space.

Mission Control and full screen tweaks in El Capitan

Mission Control is very much Apple’s pet project for the desktop and every recent release of OS X has seen some degree of improvement. In El Capitan, Mission Control features a bar at the top of the screen that shows the names of the existing desktops/full-screen apps. This replaces the thumbnail view in Yosemite although placing the mouse cursor in this area will still reveal the thumbnails.


Mission Control is vastly improved in El Capitan and apps can be switched to fullscreen by dragging them to a bar at the top of the screen
Any window shown in Mission Control can be dragged up to this new menu bar to instantly turn it into a full-screen app. The same action in Yosemite merely creates an additional desktop space.

In fact, you can perform this trick in El Capitan even if Mission Control isn’t active - just grab a window and bump it into the menu bar at the top of the screen to instantly activate Mission Control and switch an app to fullscreen. It’s pretty intuitive.
Fullscreen mode can now feature two apps side-by-side, in a feature Apple calls Split View. Split View is activated by dropping a second app onto an existing fullscreen app’s thumbnail within Mission Control.


Yosemite’s fullscreen mode is enhanced in El Capitan by the ability to run two apps side-by-side
This lets you run the likes of Safari and Calendar side-by-side in full-screen mode, for example, and each app is separated by a black bar that you can drag to adjust which app gets more screen space. If you’ve embraced fullscreen working in Yosemite then this is clearly a useful addition but we doubt it’s going to tempt most people away from the traditional way of working with regular program windows.
In both Yosemite and El Capitan some windows can’t be set to fullscreen, such as System Preferences. Nevertheless banging the System Preferences window into the top of the screen will activate Mission Control in El Capitan, and this provides a neat little power user shortcut. Interestingly, some apps that aren’t compatible with fullscreen mode, such as Calculator, can be split-screened in El Capitan. Curious!

Core tools in OS X El Capitan vs OS X Yosemite

You’ll need to look hard to see changes in Safari although this is perhaps no bad thing considering Safari has nowadays matured into a solid browser. Safari in El Cap borrows the pinned tab feature introduced by Google Chrome but, typically for Apple, implements it more sensibly by opening links you click in fresh tabs and thereby locking pinned tabs to the URL you choose. You can also mute tabs that are producing noise, such as playing a video.
The Develop menu of Safari, accessible via the Advanced pane within Safari’s Preferences, now features a cool Responsive Design mode that lets you switch the web page to dimensions used on various Apple devices.


Amongst other new features in El Capitan’s Safari, web developers can test websites against a variety of screen sizes
As with Safari, feature additions in Mail within El Capitan are subtle compared to Yosemite. If your Mac has a trackpad you can swipe left or right on a message to Trash or Delete the message, as in third-party apps like Mailbox. Annoyingly, Gmail users can’t swipe to archive a message, and there’s no configuration option to control the swipe feature. You can’t even turn it off. Nor can you click and drag with a traditional mouse to swipe in this way, which is again a little infuriating. 
In full screen mode new messages can be minimised to the bottom of the screen, and several new messages can be arranged as tabs in a feature very reminiscent of the tabbed browsing feature that arrived with Finder in OS X Mavericks.


If your Mac has a trackpad you can swipe left or right on individual messages to bin a message, or mark it as unread
Notes in El Capitan is essentially a whole new app compared to Yosemite, featuring much more control over text formatting. The app is also now a share destination from within other apps, so you can send a map location straight to a new note, for example, or even a file from Finder/the desktop. The Reminders app can also receive items in this way via its own new entry on the share menu.
Alas, to gain access to the all-new Notes features you’ll need to upgrade your Notes iCloud database. The chance to do so appears when you first run Notes on El Cap, but doing so makes your existing notes instantly incompatible with earlier versions of Apple’s operating systems.
Maps gains a new Transit button alongside standard and satellite views that shows buses, trains and other public transport routes overlaid on the standard 2D map. Unfortunately you can’t switch to 3D/satellite mode and also view transit lines, something which would be frankly very cool. Still, you’re able to see the tube lines in London mapped geographically, which is lots of fun, and can ask Maps for the best way to get from Tooting to Canary Wharf via public transport, for example. Read: Apple Maps versus Google Maps
Maps can now give directions via public transport and display transit routes geographically


Alas, in the UK it appears that only London has transit directions right now. Every other UK city we examined in the app showed an error message if the Transit button was clicked. Maps has always been a work in progress and we’re sure this situation will improve as time goes on –possibly even in time for El Capitan’s launch later this year.


Alas, the new Transit feature in Maps only works for Londoners – or at least right now
Calendar has a new option in the list of calendars that will show “events found in Mail”. We’re not entirely sure if this means Calendar picks-up events within emails even if you haven’t specifically added them. In our tests it failed to pick-up on appointments within existing messages but, again, we mustn’t forget we’re reviewing beta software.
Messages is one app arguably in desperate need of a complete overhaul but that sadly hasn’t arrived in El Capitan. Recent feature additions like tying in your iPhone’s SMS via Handoff have essentially been bolted on to an app that’s a decade old. In El Capitan there’s signs of some refinement – the preferences dialog box is now less cluttered, for example, but this is to the detriment of the ability to add a messaging status icon to the menu bar. Why would Apple take this away?

System tools in OS X El Capitan vs OS X Yosemite

With the core system tools most of use everyday without noticing Apple appears to have taken the approach of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Finder seems to be functionally and visually identical to Yosemite, for example.
A true relic of the Jobsian era, Dashboard lives on in El Capitan but, as with Yosemite, it’s deactivated by default within the Mission Control pane of System Preferences. It’s hard to Dashboard surviving into OS X 10.12 next year, especially considering that it still hasn’t been updated for Retina-equipped screens.
The new Spotlight window introduced in Yosemite can be moved around in El Capitan by clicking and dragging. It can also – thank ye Gods! – be resized to show more than a handful of results. There’s a slightly annoying caveat in that you can only make the window taller and not wider. However, the window does remember the resizing choice you make, and the position you leave it on screen.
Spotlight in El Capitan also responds to Siri-like queries, such as “photos from last November in Germany”. Quite why Apple hasn’t gone the whole hog and ported Siri to OS X is a little baffling but this is a very welcome step in that direction.


The Spotlight window in El Capitan can be resized, but only vertically
Disk Utility has been given a visual overhaul compared to Yosemite and now features a bar graph showing how full a partition is, and what kind of files are taking up the space. Strangely, the age-old ability to repair permissions has vanished. In Yosemite this tool had started to return false errors (no doubt leading to non-essential calls to Apple Care) so its removal is perhaps understandable. However, it could fix some problems on misbehaving systems. You can still scan a disk for errors via a First Aid toolbar button, though.
Disk repartitioning within Disk Utility is now handled via a more common sense pie chart representing the entire disk, with a handle on its border that can be dragged to resize individual partitions. Showing that Apple is ever ready for the future, you can set unit sizes with Disk Utility of exabytes (EB) and zettabytes (ZB). It’s unimaginable that storage will ever get that big but once upon a time 100GB of storage seemed insanely large...
Disk Utility features a much-improved partitioning tool plus the ability to set exabytes and zettabytes as size units

Little things in El Capitan

You can now set the App Store to not require a password for free downloads, or purchases/in-app purchases once the password has already been entered for that session.
The Photos app introduced with Yosemite gets a handful of minor updates, and we’ll be looking at them in detail soon, but perhaps the most significant is the ability to expand its editing abilities via third-party plugins. The folks from Pixelmator already provide a Repair Tool extension for use anywhere in OS X Yosemite, for example, so it’s not hard to imagine what kind of extensions we might see.

The editing component of Photos can be expanded in El Capitan with third-party extensions, which could make it an extremely powerful image tweaking app
One of the little things we noticed, but sadly don’t have space to mention, is that the Voice Over accessibility feature sadly doesn’t get the pleasant British English Siri voice found in iOS 8 and later. Instead, you’re stuck with the voice that’s sampled from the same somewhat brusque guy who provided the voiceovers for The Weakest Link.
We also have a comparison preview of El Capitan and Windows 10 here

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10

We compare OS X 10.11 El Capitan with Windows 10. Which is the best operating system, Windows or Mac? Read our OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison to find out more. OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 for features, security, performance and... stupidest name.

Price

• RRP: FREE upgrade for Windows users

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison preview

Here at Macworld UK it won't surprise you to learn that we are OS X users. As a consequence we are mighty excited about the upcoming release of OS X 10.11 El Capitan. But that isn't to say that we don't like to keep an eye on rival platforms, such as the also all-new Windows 10. Windows 10 is set to release next month, and like El Capitan the latest version of Windows is free to existing users. So we compared what we now know about both Windows 10 and OS X 10.11.

Disagree? Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments below. Or simply enjoy OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 for features, security, performance and... stupidest name. (We've got plenty more of this stuff, at Latest OS X news, reviews and features from the Apple experts.)

Here are our top ten features coming in OS X El Capitan

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison: UK release date

If the most important thing to you is when you can get your hands on an operating system, then you need to change to Windows, friend. (We expect this is not the case). However, Windows 10 - which is already available as a beta - will be launched on to a largely unsuspecting public on July 29 2015.

We know only that the next generation of OS X - OS X 10.11 El Capitan - will launch the 'The Fall'. Like Windows 10 it will launch once, globally. We expect a late September or early October release (the last one came out on October 16). Find out more in our OS X 10.11 El Capitan release date story.

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison: UK price

The good news is that both OS X 10.11 El Capitan and Windows 10 will be free to existing users. So if you have a relatively recent Mac, or Windows PC or laptop, you will be able to upgrade to the new OS. In fact, you will be nagged to death until you do so.

That doesn't mean that either OS is completely free. In the Windows world systems builders will have to pay to licence Windows 10 for new PCs and laptops, and it is possible that you will be able to buy Windows media. Possible. (You can get OS X 10.11 now, BTW. Check out How to download OS X El Capitan, how to update to the new Mac OS.)

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison: availability

Hardware gets more powerful, and software grows less resource hungry. So it should be no surprise that both OS X 10.11 El Capitan and Windows 10 will be able to run on lots of existing computers. This is Macworld, so we will deal with OS X 10.11 first. We don't entirely know the system requirements, but the requirements for Yosemite are the same as those for OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the previous operating system for Mac, so we think most if not all of the Macs listed below will be able to run OS X 10.11. (You can find out more about Windows 10 from our colleagues at PC Advisor in our story Windows 10 UK release date, price, features UK.)

Yosemite can run on the following Macs:

iMac (Mid-2007 or later)

MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, Late 2008), (13-inch, Early 2009 or later)

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later), (15-inch, Mid/Late 2007 or later), (17-inch, Late 2007 or later)

MacBook Air (Late 2008 or later)

Mac Mini (Early 2009 or later)

Mac Pro (Early 2008 or later)

Xserve (Early 2009)

It is a similar story with Windows 10. We know that Windows 10 will be able to run on any system that can run on Windows 8 and Windows 7. but as Windows 7 can be run fine on Windows XP hardware, we can't imagine many currently working X86 computers can't run Windows 10 - and that includes your Mac, of course.

Where Windows 10 does have the whip hand, in theory at least, is that Windows 10 will also run on mobile phones and tablets. Full Windows 10. Just how meaningful that is remains to be seen, and we suspect that you are not desperate to trade in your iPad and iPhone for a Surface and a Windows Phone. But the existance of what Microsoft calls 'continous apps' is a potentially exciting development. Being able to log in to the same app on all of your devices, and find the same data, could be a game changer. Could be. Find out if your Mac can run OS X 10.11 at Will your Macrun OS X 10.11?

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison: stupidness of name

You may think that 'El Capitan' is hard to top in terms of sheer stupidness, but consider this: Windows 7 was not the seventh version of Windows. Windows 8 followed Windows 7, and was itself superceded by Windows 8.1. And Windows 10 follows Windows 8.1. If you can work that out you are a better man than I.

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison: performance

It is impossible to make any sort of judgment on the relative performance of Windows 10 and OS X 10.11. We will of course install and test both on a variety of Macs just as soon as we can - and for final code that is going to be the late Autumn. For now we should say that we expect both to add a relatively minor speed- and stability boost to their respective hardware. But don't expect a new OS to make an older computer feel like new.

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison: software support

Now we are getting into it. The one stick with which Windows users feel impunity to beat their Mac-using cousins. It is a simple fact there is a greater volume of third-party software available to Windows users than to those of OS X. And the nature of the Windows 10 upgrade means that it is likely that virtually all Windows programs will continue to work after the new OS launches.

But that isn't a problem for OS X. We doubt very much that there is any software program that you really want to use that isn't available on your Mac, and that will continue to be the case when OS X 10.11 launches. Indeed, the fact that you can install only software pre-approved by Apple is a real bonus: it frees you from the tyranny of having to choose from myriad me-too products. And it means that any software you install will work well.

There is, however, one area in which Windows 10 will have the edge. And that is games.

Again, we doubt that there are many great games available for Windows that you can't get on OS X 10.11. But it is possible there will be some. And on OS X 10.11 you won't have the sheer volume of games to choose from that you will on Windows 10. So if sheer volume of games is your thing, head to the Windows World.

Or head to our story outlining the 65 best Mac games you should play today.

Mac vs PC: poll

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison: security

And as we are rehashing traditional Mac/PC arguments, let's take a look at another hoary old saw: security. Windows 10 will be the most secure version of Windows ever, but that still makes it less secure than OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

The same old truths apply. Because OS X is built on a Unix system, it is naturally sandboxed. Any infection that does get in can do little damage. Because this makes OS X harder to attack - and because the exclusive nature of the Mac market makes it a smaller target to hit - few criminals write viruses for OS X. And it is much safer than is Windows.

Which is not to say that Windows 10 is the leaky old Windows OS we used to see. For one thing like Windows 8 it comes with built-in AV - this is important because it boosts the immunity of the whole herd. It is much more difficult for criminals to write software to attack the newer version of Windows, and so it is XP users and earlier who bear the brunt. It is likely that Windows 10 will also be pretty secure: after all the biggest threat vector today is user behaviour, rather than drive-by attack.

But because Microsoft will push out automatic free upgrades to Windows 10, it is likely to create an even bigger target for cybercriminals. And for the reasons outlined above we would say that OS X 10.11 will remain the more secure platform. (See also:Apple steps up security with native two-factor and 6-digit passcodes.)

OS X 10.11 El Capitan vs Windows 10 comparison: new features

Okay. So far so 'what we already know'. For one final point, Mac fans, let's take a look at some of the new features in both OS X 10.11 El Capitan, and in Windows 10.

New features in OS X 10.11 include a redesigned and slightly toned-down interface. As well as other interface improvements we are hopeful for the full inclusion of Siri (this to combat the admittedly excellent Cortana in Windows 10). Although there is no word yet, the inclusion of semantic 'Spotlight' search hints at Siri for OS X. Apple is promising improved Wi-Fi features, social app discovery, and App Store search, as well as QuickType-style predictive text.

There is also better iOS- and OS X integration, including the ability to log into your Mac using an iPhone, another feature that can only match a Microsoft equivalent.

This is relevant as in Windows 10 we are promised Universal Apps, as well as the on-the-fly Continium. The idea being that all Windows devices will speak unto other Windows devices. A well as the exciting Virtual Desktops feature, the Start Menu makes a return (personally I think that is a retrograde step), and Action Center notifications get a revamp. There is another redesign of the already useful Task Manager, too.

We're intrigued by the all-new web browser, previously known as 'Project Spartan' and now renamed Microsoft Edge. This replaces Internet Explorer, which can only be a good thing. Perhaps Apple could do something about Safari at the same time.

OUR VERDICT

We are confident in saying that with the next upgrades of both Windows and OS X Apple's software remains the best choice. Because Apple makes both Macs and the OS X on which they run, they simply work better. More secure, a more curated experience, and a better performance experience. But Macs aren't cheap, and for those who wish to spend less on their computers Windows 10 looks like a very strong version of Microsoft's OS. We will of course update this piece as we spend more time with both El Capitan and Windows 10.

OS X EL CAPITAN

What's New

OS X 10.11 El Capitan, introduced at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8, is the next iteration of OS X, building on the features and design changes introduced with OS X Yosemite. OS X El Capitan might seem like a strange name, but it's meant to highlight the OS's position as an update that brings under-the-hood improvements and refinements to OS X Yosemite.

In real life, El Capitan is one of the most popular rock formations and landmarks located within Yosemite National Park. The "El Capitan" name for OS X 10.11 reflects a long-running OS X naming scheme that's used to denote updates that are refinements to previous updates, following in the footsteps of Leopard/Snow Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion.

With El Capitan, Apple focused on two major areas: user experience and performance. Improvements to window management, apps, and Spotlight search enhance the way we use our Macs, while under-the-hood additions like Metal graphics technology make everyday activities like launching apps faster.

El Capitan has the same general look as Yosemite, but it includes a new systemwide font --- San Francisco. OS X's window management feature, Mission Control, has also been revamped in the new operating system, introducing a new Split View feature that mirrors the iOS 9 multitasking feature on the iPad and allows for two full-screen apps to be used at the same time side-by-side.

Spotlight search, along with gaining deeper functionality and more sources, supports natural language input in El Capitan. Safari has gained Pinned Sites to let users pin favorite sites on the tab bar, and there's a handy new mute button that'll mute all sound coming from Safari or easily identify specific tabs playing audio.

Mail supports new iOS-style gestures for managing messages, and a Smart Suggestions addition will recognize names and events, allowing them to be quickly added to contacts and calendars. When in full screen, there are also tools to deal with multiple emails at one time.

Photos is gaining support for third-party photo editing extensions from Mac App Store apps, and the Notes app is being revamped, much like the Notes app for iOS 9. It will support checklists, content from other apps like Safari or Maps, and an Attachments Browser.

Performance-wise, the addition of Metal improves speeds across the Mac by boosting system-level graphics rendering. With the graphics improvements and other enhancements, many standard apps perform better, and games and pro apps will see significant performance boosts.

OS X 10.11 El Capitan is available immediately for developers and will be seeded to public beta testers in July. The software will launch to the public in the fall as a free update to OS X Yosemite. Thus far, Apple has seeded two El Capitan previews to developers.

Spotlight

In both OS X El Capitan and iOS 9, search is being improved. Spotlight can now generate results that access more data sources, displaying weather, stock, sports scores, and video right in the Spotlight window. A search for "Weather in Cupertino," for example, will bring up the current temperature with a weekly forecast, while a search for a stock like "AAPL" will give you the current stock price.

Web videos also show up in your results, right alongside existing data sources like Wikipedia, News, Definitions, and Bing Search. More importantly, Spotlight is also gaining support for natural language file queries. In iOS 9, you can type to Spotlight like you would speak to Siri.

"Documents I wrote in the last month," brings up the appropriate documents, as does a command like "Files Eric sent me last week" or "Emails from Bob last month." That's a huge improvement over Spotlight's search capabilities in OS X Yosemite, which are limited to specific keywords. This type of natural language search is also available in Finder and Mail and even extends to rather complex search commands like "presentation I worked on yesterday that contains budget."

There's one other small but significant change available in Spotlight in El Capitan -- a resizable window. In Yosemite, Spotlight's size is static, but in El Capitan, you can make the Spotlight window larger or smaller to display exactly what you want to see.

Window Management

MISSION CONTROL

Mission Control is OS X's window management feature. Accessible though the Mission Control app or by hitting F3 on Macs, it displays all open apps on your Mac and allows them to be organized into different spaces. In El Capitan, Mission Control has a cleaner, more streamlined design for quicker window organization.

Instead of creating a new desktop to organize windows, it's now possible to drag a window to the top of the screen to automatically create a new desktop space. It's a small change, but one that makes managing a lot of apps just a bit quicker.

SPLIT VIEW

With Split View, it's possible to run two full screen apps side-by-side, with each one taking up half of a display. This is a useful way to focus on two apps simultaneously without the distractions of the rest of your desktop. For example, when taking notes from a website, you might open Pages and Safari at the same time, scrolling through content on one side while writing on the other side.

You can do the same thing in Yosemite by resizing windows, but Split View in El Capitan makes the process quicker because there's no need to manually resize apps and change their positions on the screen.

Apps

MAIL

Building on the window management features above, Mail has better controls when it's used in full-screen mode with a new full-screen view. In Yosemite, if you use Mail in full screen, there's no way to begin a message and minimize it to do something else in the Mail app, but El Capitan fixes that problem.

When composing a message in full screen, you can now swap over to another conversation or click over to your inbox, sending the message in progress to the bottom of the screen. This makes it possible to copy text from another email or transfer attachments from message to message by dragging them.

If someone emails you a phone number or invites you to an event, Mail in El Capitan will show a little toolbar at the top of a message that has one-click options to add content to apps like Calendar and Contacts. So, for example, if a friend invites you to a 2 p.m pool party on Saturday via email, when you view that email you'll see an option to add the event right to your calendar. Emails with flight information and dinner reservations will also trigger these suggestions.

Mail's most important new feature in El Capitan may be the addition of iOS-style swipe gestures when using a trackpad. In your inbox, if you swipe on a message, you'll get quick management options. A right swipe will mark an email as read or unread, while a left swipe will let you delete messages. Again, a small change, but one that makes it a lot faster to deal with incoming emails.

NOTES

With iOS 9 and El Capitan, Apple's made some significant improvements to Notes to put the app on par with more robust note-taking apps like Evernote. In Evernote, you can add a lot of third-party content like URLs, PDFs, documents, and other files, and the same is now true in Notes.

Notes is an option in the Share Sheet of many apps in El Capitan, so if you're in Safari, for example, you can use the Share tool to quickly send a website to Notes. In Maps, you can send a map or directions to Notes, and in Photos, you can quickly add a picture or video to Notes. This change greatly enhances the functionality of Notes, turning it from an app that's good for little more than text to an app that can serve as a robust digital workspace and project management tool.

Notes in El Capitan doesn't have the same sketching features that were introduced for the iOS 9 version, but it does have the same checklist abilities, so you can quickly stick in an interactive to-do list or grocery list, with tasks and items that can be checked off in the app.

With the addition of support for many types of attachments and files, Notes now has an included Attachments Browser, where you can view all the photos, links, documents, and map locations that you've added, organized by type.

PHOTOS

Photos in El Capitan is being enhanced with the addition of third-party editing tools. Photo editing apps from the Mac App Store will be able to share their tools with Photos, so it will be possible to make edits to images with these apps without actually leaving the Photos app.

This is a capability borrowed from iOS. On the iPhone or iPad, when you use the Photos app to edit a photo, tapping the "More" button brings up third-party apps that support the direct-in-Photos editing feature. With the same capabilities in Photos for OS X, you'll be able to use several filters and extensions from different developers without needing to import a photo into multiple apps.

Photos in El Capitan also includes tools to add locations to single images or complete Moments, and the workflow for naming Faces in photos has been streamlined. Albums sorting is also improved, with sort options for organizing albums and images within by date, title, and more.

SAFARI

Safari may be the app in El Capitan that has the most exciting improvements. There's a new "Pinned Sites" feature that houses frequently visited websites on the left side of the tab bar. When a website is pinned, it stays up to date in the background, so what you're seeing when you click over to it is always current. Sites like Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter are particularly good uses of this feature, quietly refreshing in the background and always displaying the most recent info.

When watching a web video in Safari, it's now possible to AirPlay the video to the Apple TV without needing to share your entire desktop. With Yosemite, to watch a web video on the Apple TV you need to mirror your entire display, but that's not necessary in El Capitan. Compatible videos display an AirPlay icon that will stream them automatically to the Apple TV.

Safari's also gained a new "Mute All Tabs" button, accessible right in the address bar of the browser. This is an invaluable tool if you're someone that often opens a multitude of tabs because a lot of sites use autoplaying audio or video. Mute All Tabs kills the sound and it'll let you know exactly which tab is causing a problem. If you only want to mute a single tab, that's possible too.

MAPS

Maps in El Capitan has a new Transit view, which displays walking, subway, train, bus, and ferry routes, for planning out a trip that involves mass transit routing in advance. You can also choose to incorporate transit routes when getting directions. Prior to El Capitan, getting transit directions required using a third-party mapping service.

Transit directions will only be available in a select number of cities at launch, including Baltimore, Berlin, Chicago, London, Mexico City, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington D.C., and several cities in China.

Under the Hood Improvements

According to Apple, behind-the-scenes enhancements to OS X in El Capitan have made a number of apps and processes on the Mac much faster. Apps launch up to 1.4 times faster and switching between apps is up to two times faster. Opening Mail and displaying the first messages is said to be two times faster, and opening a PDF in the Preview app is said to be four times faster.

One of the major performance enhancements in El Capitan comes in the form of the adoption of Apple's core graphics technology, Metal. Metal was first introduced with iOS 8, and in El Capitan it combines OpenGL and OpenCL under a single API. With Metal, the amount of work the CPU needs to do to render graphical effects is reduced, offloading tasks to the GPU.

With Metal, Apple says system-level graphics rendering is 40 percent more efficient and 50 percent faster. This translates to better performance from graphics-intensive apps and Metal also brings some significant enhancements to games. It improves draw call performance by up to 10x, which could lead to more realism and detail in future titles.

Other Changes

SAN FRANCISCO FONT

One of the biggest visual changes in OS X El Capitan is a new systemwide font --- San Francisco. Originally designed for the Apple Watch, San Francisco is a condensed sans serif font that's not unlike Helvetica. It was created specifically for small displays with extra spacing between each letter to increase legibility on the wrist, but as it turns out, it also looks fantastic on the Retina screens of iPhones and Macs.

CURSOR

On a large screen, it can sometimes be difficult to locate a small cursor, especially when waking a Mac. In El Capitan, there's a new cursor feature that causes the cursor to grow larger when you move your finger back and forth on a trackpad or shake a connected mouse so you can see right where it is on the screen.

FIND MY FRIENDS

In El Capitan, there's a new Notification Center widget for the "Find My Friends" app, allowing people to access the locations of their friends more quickly.

NEW BEACHBALL

The iconic rainbow wheel pointer or "beachball" used to indicate when something is loading on OS X has been updated with El Capitan. It's now flatter and it has brighter, more defined colors.

DISK UTILITY

Disk Utility has an entirely new look in El Capitan with a status bar that shows how much disk space is being used and what it's used by.

FEATURES FOR CHINESE AND JAPANESE USERS

For Chinese users, there's a new Ping Fang system font that's crisper, enhanced keyboard input with better language prediction, and improved trackpad handwriting with a new Trackpad window that provides more room to write multiple characters in a row.

For Japanese users, there are four new Japanese fonts and a dramatic improvement for entering Japanese text. El Capitan includes an enhanced vocabulary and improved language engine, automatically transforming Hiragana into written Japanese and eliminating the need to press the space bar for individual word conversions.

El Capitan for Developers

El Capitan includes a lot of new tools for developers and by taking a look at these tools, we can get an idea of the changes the new operating system will bring to third-party apps. First and foremost, developers can access the aforementioned Metal APIs, which will result in better graphics in games and better performance in graphics-intensive apps.

Force Touch APIs for Safari are included in El Capitan and will let developers build unique Force Touch gestures into websites. In the future, we may see websites where a Force Touch does something special, like saving a photo or sharing a video. Force Touch is available on the Apple Watch, the new 13- and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros and the 12-inch Retina MacBook, but in the future, it may be a staple feature in all Apple products.

Apple's already introduced Force Touch APIs for third-party Mac apps, so we'll also be seeing apps that take advantage of the feature in the near future.

Along with Force Touch, there are a lot of new tools for Safari. Some of these include a Shared Links API for adding link suggestions to Safari's Shared Links feature, AirPlay for HTML5 video for streaming to the Apple TV without needing to mirror a display, and Picture-in-Picture support that will let an HTML 5 video overlay another app.

Developers are also able to create app extensions for Photos, and as mentioned above, this will let third-party editing tools be used directly within the Photos app, much like a plugin.

Discuss OS X 10.11 El Capitan

We have a dedicated OS X 10.11 forum, where users discuss their thoughts on the new operating system, showcase new discoveries, and share bugs and issues they're experiencing.

The OS X 10.11 forum is a fantastic resource for learning about El Capitan and it's well worth checking out to get more details on the new OS. Of particular interest may be an ongoing thread that details all of the smaller changes in El Capitan.

Compatibility

OS X El Capitan runs on any Mac that is able to run Yosemite, including some Macs that are more than seven years old. With the included performance enhancements, El Capitan may even run faster than Yosemite on some Macs. Here's a full list of Macs that can run 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)

Release Date

El Capitan is currently available for developers. The first beta was provided on June 8, just after the Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple plans to offer a public beta of OS X 10.11 in July, with a public release following in the fall.

Mac OS X Isn’t Safe Anymore: The Crapware / Malware Epidemic Has Begun

OS X users like to make fun of Windows users as the only ones that have a malware problem. But that’s simply not true anymore, and the problem has increased dramatically in the last few months. Join us as we expose the truth about what’s really going on, and hopefully warn people about the impending doom.
Since it is actually Unix under the hood, OS X has some native protection against the worst types of viruses. But the problem these days isn’t viruses that completely break your computer, it’s spyware, crapware, and adware that sneaks onto your computer, hijacks your browser, inserts ads, and tracks what you are looking at. And much of it is legal, because you get tricked into clicking the wrong thing during an installer.

And now download sites, fake ads for software on search engines, and sketchy applications are bundling adware and crapware into installers for legitimate software. You can’t just assume you are safe anymore because you’re on OS X. You need to be careful what you download and what you click.
If you don’t think this is a big deal, think again. These pieces of adware insert themselves directly into the browser, and they are analyzing and running even on secure sites like your bank, credit card site, and email, sending back data to their servers. They aren’t using an HTTPS hijacking proxy quite yet from what we can tell during our research, but it’s only a matter of time, and they might already be doing it and we haven’t found the proof yet.
Since we are primarily Mac users ourselves here at How-To Geek, we’re really hoping that Apple takes a different tactic with this problem than Microsoft has with Windows and doesn’t allow these scam artists to destroy their platform.

Bundled Crapware for OS X is Getting Worse Every Day

This fake VLC installer is serving up insidious malware, one of the worst that we’ve come across.

It wasn’t that long ago that you could install almost anything for OS X from almost any website, and you didn’t really have to worry about what you clicked on. That’s just not true anymore, and while things are better than they are on Windows, it’s only a matter of time at this point.

You still have a safe source for software with the Mac App Store, but the problem is that not all vendors sell their software through the App Store, and many of them are selling older versions there and have the latest version on their own website. If you do stick to the App Store, you have nothing to worry about. We’d love to see Apple fix some of the App Store issues and make everybody use it.
Just like on Windows, you don’t have to look any further than CNET Downloads to find bundled crapware… even for Mac. That’s right, they’ve gone cross-platform with this nonsense. And they’ve made it worse, because you either have an Install button, or a Close button. There’s not even a Decline anymore! When you click Close, the installer shuts down entirely. So you either have bundled crapware that hijacks your browser, or you don’t get to install that app.

They are like the Old Faithful of bundled crapware. You can always count on them.

The one in the screenshot installs Spigot and a bunch of other nonsense that redirects your browser to Yahoo, installs a bunch of unwanted plugins, and generally makes the flying spaghetti monster cry. It’s amazing how much money Yahoo must be sinking into these things to hijack your browser to their search engine… when it’s not even theirs. Yahoo Search is really just a rebranded version of Bing. Oh well.
Oh my! On the next screen, the installer finally allows you to Decline something again! Maybe the thing in the screenshot is so bad even CNET Downloads doesn’t want to force it on you. Not a good sign.

Seriously, you should think twice before using anything that bundles itself.

Of course, it’s not just CNET Downloads doing the bundling — we found a number of other apps being distributed on freeware download sites that are doing their own bundling. For instance, YTD that loads HTTPS-hijacking adware for Windows has a Mac version. And they are also bundling Spigot. Want to torrent something? Why don’t you go download uTorrent from their website? Seems like people love using that. Ohhh.

Somebody must have forgotten to turn off the spigot on the crapware hose.

The problem gets much, much worse when you try to search for freeware using your favorite search engine. It’s worth noting here that Google has just recently starting trying to ban bundled crapware from their results and ads, but sadly Yahoo and Bing don’t have the same level of awesome. In fact, they are just terrible.
If you are an average, regular user and you search Yahoo for “vlc download,” you would be presented with something that looks like the next screenshot. And every single thing on the page is actually a link to a bundled crapware installer for VLC, and almost all of them are cross-platform and work on OS X. And the text that says “ad” is almost invisible.

Yahoo! It’s them there crapware that what people be talkin bout! Yeehaw!

When an unsuspecting user tries to use one of these installers, they will be presented with a screen similar to this one… which installs the InstallMac awfulness that hijacks everything and puts adware into your system — it’s terrible. And, of course, the next screen tries to get you to install something else that you don’t need. And then something else. It’s so much crapware.

I bet the VLC folks are so tired of seeing scammers do this to their great software.

We’ve found a lot more software that’s being served up this way, with a ton of installers from almost every bundled crapware installer company. Here’s an install wrapper for OpenOffice bundled with a really lousy piece of adware that just takes over your browser. Yeah, we searched Yahoo again for OpenOffice, and clicked on what we actually thought was the real site because their “ad” text was so small that we couldn’t tell the difference. And this is what came up.

This thing claims to be a “better online experience” for videos. But it injects ads everywhere.

It’s about to become an epidemic for Mac users. So what do we have to look forward to?

Adware and Malware on OS X is Almost as Awful as on Windows

Every couple of minutes your browser does this and the only option is to quit.

When you do manage to get infected with something, most of the adware, malware, and spyware on OS X is going to try to infect your browser somehow, hijacking your New Tab, search, and home pages, injecting ads into pages, and randomly popping up obnoxious tech support alerts. Most of it won’t wipe your hard drive or anything really terrible… but based on the increasing sophistication that we’re seeing, it’s only a matter of time.
Many of these browser hijackers will insert ads that pop up messages that cannot be dismissed no matter what you do, as you can see in the screenshot above. And they’ll randomly show up all the time while you’re browsing, and you have to CMD + Q to close the app out entirely to get rid of them. Essentially, your browser becomes completely useless.
The simplest adware will install itself into your browser as an extension, and reset all of your pages to go through their awful, terrible search engine. And by that we mostly mean Yahoo… but there are a ton of others like searchmoose, search-quick, and searchbenny that use their own fake search engines. A few of them will redirect you to Bing, but never directly. It’s always through an intermediary like Trovi.
Most of the ads that get injected will try to trick you into installing even more ads using fake Java plugin messages, or messages that tell you to install a codec or a new version of Flash. All of these are fake, of course, and will just install even more crapware and malware on your computer. Every now and then one of them will try to serve up a piece of Windows adware, but for the most part they are smart enough to know you’re a Mac user and serve up the appropriate piece of crapware.

Searchbenny is really Trovi which is really Bing. That isn’t a real Java message, it’s fake.

A lot of the adware will redirect your search engine to a fake search engine that looks a lot like Google or Bing, but all of the results are nothing but ads.
And then it will randomly start talking to you. Literally. It plays audio ads through your speakers. We heard an ad for Northrup Grumman. How crazy is that? (We’re quite certain that they don’t know about this.)

Auto-playing audio ads in the background? Sprinkles are for winners.

We just showed off some of the annoying adware, but much of the bundled crapware is pretty lousy stuff as well, and almost every single crapware bundler that we found, and almost every single adware ad tried to get us to install MacKeeper. We don’t know much about it, although we do plan to look into how it works because these tactics are questionable.

8 out of 10 shady crapware installers recommend it!

The biggest trend that we’ve noticed in adware is that almost all of it tries to redirect your browser and search engine to Yahoo. Somebody over there at Yahoo needs to get fired.

Digging Deeper: How Some of This Malware Actually Works

Would you like this on every shopping page you visit?

The simple adware works the way most adware does, by installing itself into Safari’s extensions, which is pretty easy to uninstall. The problem is that only a few pieces of adware worked this way in our research.

When GoldenBoy grows up, he becomes a supervillain.

All of the search engine hijacking, home page redirecting, and extensions injecting ads are one thing. The bigger problem is the serious malware, which installs itself deep into the operating system, and the average person would never be able to remove it. There’s no uninstaller, there’s no Startup item, there’s no plugins in your browser, extensions, or anything else that appears to be installed.
What there are, however, are really awful ads injected into everything you do, making your computer slower than dirt. Your search engine will be hijacked, and it’s possible that your browser will be routed through a proxy. This is outright malware, it’s not just adware anymore, even if you accidentally forgot to uncheck a box somewhere. It works the same way the Trovi malware does on Windows, by injecting itself into processes.
These more serious pieces of malware install themselves as a daemon, or service, that runs in the background and behind the scenes. You can find these things in the /Library/LaunchAgents or /Library/LaunchDaemons folder, which will have some really weird looking items that just don’t belong. This folder could also be used for real things from real applications, so don’t go cleaning out this folder entirely or anything.

All three entries launch the same process in different ways so it stays running.

An examination of the plist file will show you where the actual malware resides, which is usually in a completely separate folder.

That folder appears to be randomly named.

When you head into that folder and examine the Version.plist file, you’ll get some more information about what’s actually going on. This thing is called Search-Quick and it supports hijacking Chrome and Safari, as well as the Webkit nightly build for some reason.

That really long string that ends in .com? Somebody should shut that domain name down.

Examining further comes up with something curious… the person who wrote this malware wanted to give special thanks to his mom.

Somebody should find his mom and let her know what he’s been up to.

Once the malware is launched by OS X as a daemon, it then uses a little-known piece of functionality in OS X that allows one process to inject itself into another process. You can see how it works by opening a terminal and running the agent executable directly. What’s actually going on is that it will attach itself to your web browser and load itself as a hidden extension. In the screenshot below you can see that it activated for process ID 544, which was Google Chrome. It’ll do the same to Safari if it is open.

Based on lsof output it appears that this malware is using low-level dyld library injection to hijack your browser.

This means that adware or malware is running inside of your web browser, injecting itself into every page that you visit. It doesn’t matter if you are visiting a secure banking site or not, they are already inside. One of the side effects of this malware is that your entire computer will be extremely slow, all the time, no matter what you’re doing.
For some tips on removing adware and malware in OS X, you can read the Apple support document, or just wait for our upcoming articles on the subject. We’ll be doing a lot more research into all of these things.

So What Does This All Mean, and How Do You Protect Yourself?

The trusty App Store is your best bet for most things.

Even though we’ve shown that malware, adware, crapware, and spyware is getting increasingly worse on OS X, that doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to worry or go out and install Linux or do something drastic. OS X is still not being targeted as much as Windows is, and there are still some security measures in place that make it more difficult for malware to get through.
The safest thing that you can do is use the Mac App Store to install your applications whenever possible. These applications have been verified by Apple and should be just fine to use, and definitely won’t come with any bundled crapware or adware.
Restrict Apps that Aren’t From the App Store
This won’t entirely fix the problem, but you can configure OS X to automatically restrict any executables that don’t come from the App Store. This won’t apply to applications already installed on your computer, no matter where they come from. It will simply apply to new downloads.
Head to System Preferences -> Security & Privacy, click the Lock icon at the bottom, and then flip the setting over to Mac App Store instead of the default.

Once you do this, trying to run anything that isn’t in the App Store will automatically show a block message. You can choose to still open it if you right-click and choose Open and then choose Open again, but by default everything is blocked.

This doesn’t solve the issue of applications that you do want to install having bundled crapware that requires opting out by default. But it is a great security setting for your relatives.
When you do need to install an application from elsewhere, make sure it’s really a trusted source, and not a fake site serving up open source freeware with a bundleware wrapper.

You should also consider disabling your browser plugins — for Chrome and Firefox, that’s pretty easy, for Safari it’s a little more complicated. The biggest thing you can do is disable your Java plugin, because it’s pretty rare for you to need that, and because Java was responsible for 91% of attacks in 2013. This will reduce your likelihood of being targeted with a zero-day attack.
It might even be time to start considering an antivirus for OS X, at least if you like to install a lot of software from sources outside of the App Store. If you don’t, it’s probably not quite as big of a deal, but we’re getting closer to the point where it will be needed. What we’re not sure quite yet is what antivirus for Mac is even worthwhile and blocks this type of stuff — on Windows, most antivirus doesn’t block bundled crapware and adware at all, because they are legal since you had to agree during the install process. So don’t just go pay for some antivirus right now. Just keep it in mind for the future.
Other than that, just be careful what you click on, and don’t trust error messages that pop up in your web browser window. If you see something that says your computer is infected and pops up a message, hold down that CMD + Q shortcut key combination to close out of everything immediately.
There’s no better time for Windows users to switch to Mac. With this much crapware and adware being developed, they’ll feel right at home! (We’re joking, of course.)