
Apple OS X El Capitan - NickSarath
http://www.apple.com/live/2015-june-event/40d96cf4-33a4-48ca-9335-815af736ce39/
======
zamalek
> Metal is coming to Mac, paving the way for new levels of realism and detail
> in games and other apps.

I'm guessing this is _yet another API_ like Mantle/Vulkan that is also seated
comfortably in the Apple walled garden and increases the development costs:
_awesome!_

~~~
izacus
And it's 40% faster! .... Of course they forgot to mention that OGL drivers on
OS X were about 30% slower than OGL/DX drivers on Windows on the same hardware
running same scene. So instead of updating their OpenGL 3D performance they
just kept it back and now you're forced to use a proprietary walled garden API
for full performance.

This kind of behaviour makes me really really sorry to be an Apple customer :/

~~~
rimantas
> This kind of behaviour makes me really really sorry to be > an Apple
> customer :/

Well, don't be then. I don't get this cry about walled gardens. Feel free to
roam in the jungle if you don't like them.

~~~
gtf21
> Well, don't be then. I don't get this cry about walled gardens. Feel free to
> roam in the jungle if you don't like them.

I really don't get why people pull this "if you don't like it, leave" argument
(in everything from politics to tech). There are lots of reasons someone might
want to use a mac (I do), one is perfectly entitled to complain about aspects
of Apple's approach to try to make the argument for change.

~~~
zamalek
I think it originates from misunderstanding what a walled garden is and why
they are great for customer retention. The whole point of walled garden is
locking people in.

Avoiding a walled garden can only happen _before_ you invest in the garden.
Once you have spent money in iTunes or the store (or e.g. even have a long
list of contacts in some IM client) you are stuck unless you are happy to lose
those purchases/data.

~~~
Dain42
I had this experience leaving the Apple walled garden about six years ago and
moving on to Ubuntu (with Windows for gaming purposes in free time). I just
kind of ate the costs. I suppose technically I still have access to my video
content purchased on iTunes, but I'd have to boot to Windows or use a VM to
get to it.

My rationale was kind of along the lines of avoiding the sunk cost fallacy:
just because I'd been invested in the Apple ecosystem for 20-some years and
buying iTunes stuff for more than half a decade didn't mean that I should just
_keep_ doing that when I was unhappy with other things. But that cost-benefit
calculus might work out differently for other people. The lock-in is very real
if you don't want to lose your stuff. It's a reason that I still refuse to buy
movies from any online service. Only discs that I can rip or DRM free
downloads for me from now on, so I don't end up walled-in again.

Eventually I was able to rescue all my protected music at least by paying what
ammounted to a $25 ransom for a year of iTunes Match (or whatever they call it
now) so I could download DRM free versions of the music I'd already paid for.

~~~
sixbrx
I did a similar "switch" where I kept my macbook/retina display laptop
hardware but switched to Windows 8 for the OS.

It's been a good experience except for one thing: Apple delivers no drivers
for the integrated video, disables it in EFI from Bootcamp, so it runs hot and
has a short battery life when not in OS X. I haven't seen anyone reporting
success working around this problem, and it's been going on for years for us
"switchers" to Windows.

~~~
kayoone
that is strange, as other macbooks that only have an iGPU work fine on windows
8.

------
sirn
Since no one already mentioned about it, here's an update to WebKit in Safari
9.0[1]. Just to pick a few:

* Force Touch Trackpad Mouse Events

* Content Blocking Safari Extensions (bytecode-compiled content blocklist for both iOS and OSX)

* SFSafariViewController for iOS (as an alternative to UIWebKit and WKWebKit)

* ECMAScript 6 support

* CSS properties are now unprefixed (including flexbox!)

I'm excited about the content blocking extension; it replaces the existing
canLoad API that needs to be called on every request (which may result in some
performance hit) with a JSON ruleset that will be bytecode-compiled and
blocked by Safari itself. The better news is that an iOS app could also
provide the JSON block list, so this works on Mobile Safari too.

[1]:
[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releaseno...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH9-SW5)

~~~
bsimpson
Looks like some of the most useful ES6 features (such as lambda arrows and
rest/spread/destructuring) are still not supported, so Babel isn't going away
any time soon.

Also interesting to see that they redesigned Dev Tools again. I'm guessing
enough people found the new ones so much harder to use than the original (that
Chrome is still iterating on) that they felt the need to make it look more
like what people were used to.

Finally, it looks like they're introducing a filter variant called backdrop-
filters. It's in the Apple-edited CSS Filters spec, but I don't see any noise
about it from the Chrome or Firefox evangelism teams. I wonder if it will be
Apple-proprietary, or if other vendors are interested in it:

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=497522](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=497522)

------
teraflop
For anyone else who's wondering where the actual information is: you have to
scroll up, not down. Far from obvious on a mobile device.

~~~
monroepe
Thank you. I was wondering about it.

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sinatra
It looks like an incremental release. Not a bad idea considering how many bugs
/ issues Yosemite had. Hopefully, El Capitan fixes most of them.

~~~
nemothekid
Same, I'm still on Mavericks, and Yosemite still feels like "bleeding edge" to
me.

~~~
Dain42
I have to support an elementary school full of Macs, and Yosemite has been my
ongoing nightmare. (Well, that and the bad joke known as OS X Server.) I won't
update during the year for obvious reasons, but I'm still trying to decide
whether or not I'm going to have to fragment my environment again (after just
getting it all together with 10.9, finally). The incentive from Apple is very
strong to install 10.10, but it just runs like utter garbage on all our older
machines. And we can't run out and buy new ones whenever they feel like
killing all hardware more than about 3 or 4 years old.

I'm still trying to convince people that our younger kids can learn just fine
using the web browser on Windows and that we're overpaying money for these
Macs (about double what we'd pay for a comparable Windows machine from our
vendors) and wasting our tight budget. But there are a few people who just
will not let them go. It's a real PITA running this mixed environment without
another person to do sys/net admin stuff, or someone to handle more front-line
support.

At this point, I'd take Apple just putting a stop to releasing these updates
for iOS and OS X out at the beginning of the school year. It would be so much
better if they'd do it about 4 months earlier.

~~~
addandsubtract
>The incentive from Apple is very strong to install 10.10

And what incentive is that? Unless you need to latest Xcode to develop iOS
apps, I don't see a reason to use Yosemite. I, for one, am happy to have
stayed on 10.9 and will stick with it until El Capitan proves to be an
"upgrade".

~~~
wwweston
> And what incentive is that?

For one thing, they won't sell you Mavericks anymore. If you didn't buy it
while it was out, it is simply unavailable for you to purchase. They obviously
_could_ sell it to you, but they won't. It's a matter of intentional policy to
make sure you don't buy in at any point earlier than the current one.

(Take that in, BTW. That means someone at Apple made the judgment that it is
literally more important that you have their latest than it is for everyone to
have a stable, reliable OS.)

~~~
bornabox
Ah come on. Yosemite is not a stable, reliable OS? That's just hyperbole...
Running 10.10.3 on half a dozen machines, mostly older ones, and it's stable,
reliable and working just fine. MBPro's, Mac Mini's, MBAir, iMac.

~~~
chiph
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not ...

Overall OS stability has gone down with Yosemite. I have to restart far more
often than I should -- usually after coming out of sleep mode.

------
cpr
[http://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-
preview/](http://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/) is the right link.

------
pmdulaney
When Apple switched from the big cats naming scheme to "places in California"
I predicted (mostly to my adult children, who all have Apple computers): "How
much ya wanna bet it's gonna be a cold day in hell when they name a build
after someplace in SOUTHERN California?" If I'm wrong, I suppose the first
build named after something in SoCal will be called "Joshua Tree" \-- nice tie
in with U2.

~~~
santaclaus
I'm looking forward to OS X 10.12, La Brea.

~~~
Dain42
Considering how 10.10 traps machines older than about 3 years in the digital
equivalent thereof, they missed their chance.

~~~
epmatsw
Happily using 10.10 on a 6 year old macbook pro :)

~~~
jakobegger
Me too :)

------
Spiritus
Anyone know what Python version comes bundled with El Capitan? I assume it's
still 2.7.x, but one can always dream they have moved to Python 3 :)

~~~
dudus
I'm guessing 2.7 but I think we'll need a few months until the preview is
available to know for sure.

~~~
jtth
Few months? I'm downloading it right now.

~~~
voltagex_
I've never used a preview build - will there be a DMG or do I need an existing
Mac to upgrade?

------
lambdasquirrel
Welp... it looks like OS X is about to discover tiling window management lite.
;)

~~~
eivarv
On a serious note: if you need automatic window tiling in OS X, you should
check out Amethyst [0] (available via homebrew cask). I mention this
everywhere I can because I spent a lot of time searching for and testing
various window management software for OS X myself, and Amethyst is only easy,
fully functional alternative I've found that works out of the box.

[0]: [https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst](https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst)

~~~
the_gipsy
Sorry, amethyst is nowhere near real tiling window managers. Hopefully with
this we'll see real tiling window managers.

~~~
eivarv
In what way? What functionality do you think that Amethyst is missing?

As for "Split View", it looks more like a simple two-window extension of the
existing full screen functionality to me.

------
jordanthoms
It is amusing how they are touting 'faster app switching' for the new release,
when it was instant a few versions ago and has got steadily slower over the
last few OSX releases (even on the latest hardware). It's good they are
finally addressing some of the performance issues, but it's a bit embarrassing
that things got to this point.

------
tdicola
I wonder if discoveryd will come back or if it's gone for good.

------
bitsoda
Hooray for native window snapping. This is one less utility app I need to
install on a fresh copy of OS X.

------
chrisdevereux
Any word on minimum specs from people who've got the beta?

I'm guessing that moving the system graphics frameworks over to Metal will
result in the minimum specs being bumped to whatever they've written Metal
drivers for.

~~~
threeseed
At minimum it would be supporting whatever Yosemite did.

And surely the OS would be falling back to existing behaviour if Metal is not
supported.

------
newman314
I didn't see a list of supported hardware. Anyone know if a mid-2009 Macbook
will be supported?

Also, I'm really hoping Apple supports ed25519 in ssh in 10.11... No reason
why this is not available at this point.

~~~
moepstar
In the same boat here, still running Mavericks on my MBP 17" from mid-2009.

Wonder how the performance is gonna be...

~~~
newman314
Yosemite on the MacbookPro mid-2009, slowest CPU is surprisingly spry on a SSD
(Samsung EVO). The only two things I really miss are AESNI speed FileVault and
updated SSH.

It's not going to set any records but totally usable for more normal tasks.
What I really want is an up to date SSH without having to do ports/homebrew
etc. so that I don't have to have exceptions for my setup.

------
meesterdude
I say bring it! I moved all my development into a linux VM, so i'm shielded
from them totally mucking things up further. Will be just another upgrade for
me, instead of a nightmare.

Apple wants more entrenchment; to make it even harder to switch to something
else. I'm already stuck on OSX because of itunes purchases and iphone sync,
but that's really all it does for me at this point.

I definitely gave up features when switching to linux, And I'd do it again in
a heartbeat. The less I rely on OSX, the better off I am. I've just been
bitten too many times by attempts at innovation that only hinder me, and
running old OSX because the newer version has problems or issues is not really
a great solution either.

------
sidcool
Intelligence is a pretty nifty feature.

------
skybrian
I'm seeing a slide with almost no information. Is there a better link for
this?

~~~
5hank3rat0r
For now, I think this is the link [http://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-
preview/](http://www.apple.com/osx/elcapitan-preview/)

------
apendleton
I was probably stupidly hoping this might finally be the release where they
actually did something about their awful antiquated filesystem. Maybe next
year.

~~~
jfmercer
I've been hoping for exactly the same thing.

------
lmg643
will we be able to change the zoom on the font in an email without increasing
the font size? Huge PITA on Mac compared to Windows.

~~~
rsfinn
Right-click in the window's toolbar (or title bar), choose "Customize
Toolbar...", and drag the "Smaller"/"Bigger" pair of control into the toolbar.

I agree this is not very discoverable compared to the usual Zoom In / Zoom Out
menu items. Mail suffers from its age in many ways.

~~~
lmg643
thanks for responding, I will try this out at home. Microsoft Outlook for Mac
2011 does not have this functionality, although the Windows version has for
years.

I figured other users might have this type of problem as well but for all the
downvotes...I guess not.

This minor feature was enough to drive me away from Mac Mail, and Outlook for
Mac, over to Outlook on a Windows Virtual Machine.

Having a high-res 27" monitor is a blessing in many ways, but a literal
headache in others, particularly late night.

------
gcb0
gotta love the adoption rate being percentage and not numbers. osx would show
as a flat line...

~~~
freehunter
Using numbers for adoption rate would make no sense at all. There would be no
context for it. The comparison is how many installs are on the latest version.
It would have to be X number out of Y number of installs in order to find out
how many installs are running the same version. And then if you're doing X out
of Y, you might as well normalize Y to 100, then you get a percent.

If you're looking to see how many of your users are on the latest version,
percent is the only thing that makes any sense.

~~~
buster
I think the point is, if Apple (or Google or whoever) would be the clear
market leader, they'd probably show total count and be like "whoa, look, our
last OS was the fastest growing from since beginning of time!!!!" (showing X
units sold/year instead of percentage/months). And all fanboys would go
"woohhooo, AppGooSoft is so awesome, everybody buys it!".

~~~
freehunter
And that would be true in that case, but why would anyone take time from a
keynote to highlight a metric they're not good at? What Apple is doing right
is getting the majority of their devices upgraded to the latest version as
soon as possible. They're doing better than Google in that regard. Meanwhile
during Google's keynote, they would say how many Android devices are shipping
compared to iOS devices, and say nothing about how quickly people are
upgrading.

Toyota is showing off their Prius and say that it gets 100mpg. You're sitting
in the back saying "yeah but the Vayron goes 200mph, why don't you show off
how fast _your_ car goes?" Everyone is good at something and not good at
everything.

The actual point the parent was trying to make is that Apple sux and Google
rox, which is massively off topic.

