
Ask HN: Has anyone else skipped El Capitan entirely? - gnicholas
Have used Macs for 25 years, and I just realized that El Capitan will be the first major OS version I&#x27;ve ever skipped. I recall seeing that the initial upgrade numbers were low, but I didn&#x27;t suspect at the time that I might end up skipping the version altogether. Anybody else in the same boat? Would also be interested to know what I&#x27;m missing out on, if there&#x27;s anything cool.
======
kn0where
El Capitan is a refining-things release, much like Snow Leopard was to Leopard
or Windows 7 was to Vista (although comparing Yosemite to Vista is admittedly
a big stretch). If you're using Yosemite, just upgrade to El Capitan.

There are some subtle new features that, since you're a long-time Mac user
like myself, are nice to have but that you probably won't use. However, it
fixes a lot of things that were rough in Yosemite. For example, the San
Francisco system font is much more legible than Helvetica Neue was. There were
also just a lot of general bug fixes in El Capitan. Now that it's been out for
almost a year, most issues should be ironed out, so it's never been a better
time to upgrade.

~~~
gnicholas
Thanks for the specifics. I've been eager for past optimization releases, like
Snow Leopard, but didn't hear great things about El Cap. My biggest hesitation
is that I'm a longtime user of MenuMeters, which is not compatible with El
Cap:
[https://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/](https://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/).

~~~
pohl
I wonder what's up with MenuMeters. What could code signature restrictions
prevent them from doing that isn't preventing iStat Menus from running on El
Capitan? They seem like similar products.

~~~
gnicholas
Yeah, dunno. Also, this [1] popped up, which appears to be very similar. I
trusted MenuMeters and used them for over a decade, and I'm hesitant to jump
onto some no-name version (even if it is open source, since I'm not savvy
enough to investigate myself). Will probably try iStat since they've been
around for a long time.

1:
[http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/](http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/)

~~~
pohl
Thanks for that link. The bottom section satisfies my curiosity very nicely.

Regarding your question, I adopted El Capitan as early as the public beta, and
was happy with the improvements even at such an early stage. I never
encountered any of the problems that I read about others having. I got the
impression that those of us who were satisfied simply had no motivation to
post online (in contrast to those who were encountering bugs).

~~~
gnicholas
Yeah, there's definitely skew in comments that lean toward complaints. I was
going mostly based on reports that adoption was significantly slower than
previous releases, although it neared 50% by Feb 2016:
[http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040692/apple-
mac/mac-o...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040692/apple-mac/mac-
owners-in-no-rush-to-adopt-os-x-el-capitan.html)

~~~
pohl
There's an interesting graph on this article that could have put that
article's observation about adoption rate into an interesting perspective.
Alas, the El Capitan line is just getting started, so it doesn't show the part
of the story that I was hoping to see.

But it shows graphs of the last several versions – the last four of which are
interesting because they show what adoption has been like since Apple started
the annual release cadence. Their profiles aren't remarkably different, to my
eye. They all have similar peaks immediately prior to the release of its
successor.

[http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-rise-and-fall-of-mac-os-x-
vers...](http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-rise-and-fall-of-mac-os-x-
versions-2009-to-2015/)

------
SiVal
El Capitan runs on the same machines as the previous several OS X versions,
supporting machines back to 2007. The next one, MacOS Sierra, drops support
for many of those machines.

This suggests that El Cap is the final cleanup of an underlying version that
hasn't changed much, while Sierra will be make larger changes underneath. I
look at that as a good sign for El Cap. They've identified various problems
that they'll never admit to but have silently fixed, so El Cap will probably
help more than harm.

Sierra, on the other hand, might be worth watching for a while before you
decide.

~~~
fuzzywalrus
The fascinating part is they're dropping support for a few boxes with no real
logical cut off, prior were non-64 bit EFI machines, largely 2006 Mac models.
Despite this, you can still install and run OS X rather smoothly on 2006 Mac
Pros.

I have a 2008 Mac Pro, and probably will end just bypassing Apple's safe
guards. You'd think it'd be not worth the effort but the only things I've
noticed my 2008 Mac Pro misses that my 2015 Mac Pro are mostly the lack of
VP-x which means you can't run the Windows Phone simulator (not a big deal)
and there's a minor performance gap CPU wise and disk performance wise. That
said, a lot of the long-in-tooth reason why this machine is still going strong
is modular design: 24 GB of a RAM + GeForce GTX 780 means that its still a
better gaming machine than any Mac laptop to date.

I don't see any reason to drop 2008 Mac Pros, and I've already seen users
running the beta, so I imagine I'll be upgrading against Apple's wishes.

------
dshep
I'm still on OSX 10.9.5 (Mavericks). Don't really like the iOS-style UI stuff
they added after and don't need any of the features. The next time I have an
iOS project that'll probably force me to upgrade though...

------
PlayMeWhile
I use iTerm2 and for some reason couldn't upgrade it to 3.x on previous mac os
version. The bug ticket on MacPorts even said that I need to have El-Capitan
before updating. (But that might simply be a problem within mac-ports).

Only upgraded yesterday. Don't find anything that different. Screens (at least
iTerm) seem to fade in and out faster. Also if you move your mouse in a circle
consistently the cursor will become bigger. Presumably to help detect it on
big screens.

The official post-update "show-off" was talking about updated FaceTime,
Messages, iPhoto and a bunch of other programs I never use.

------
wingerlang
I did, but probably not for any specific reason other than having my dev
environment setup and not wanting to disturb it. Some tools I use were very
shaky with the root changes (was it?) so I just skipped it.

I also keep Xcode6 around for the same purpose and the thought of adding yet
another Xcode version is not pleasant. And the latest version requires El
Capitan.

I'll jump to Sierra directly, if my mac runs it (Macbook late 2008).

------
nowlnowl
I am still at 10.6.8

~~~
gnicholas
Is hardware compatibility/sluggishness a concern?

I'm on a 2013 MBA and assume it could handle El Cap but just had no reason to
upgrade. When I think back on prior upgrades, they were typically driven (for
me) by feature compatibility with iOS (iMessage, Airdrop, etc.).

~~~
trolly
Security fixes?

~~~
gnicholas
Security updates still auto-download regularly. I don't know how many OSes
back Apple issues these for, but being -1 seems OK.

------
saluki
I put it off for a while but El Capitan was a painless and definitely sped
things up and improved things so I wish I'd upgraded earlier.

------
Esau
I am running El Capitan and I have not really had any issues with it. It is
largely just a refinement to the previous release.

------
daveloyall
Sounds like you have actually skipped LOTS of major OS versions, like Debian
5.0 for example.

