Ask HN: Has anyone else skipped El Capitan entirely?
Have used Macs for 25 years, and I just realized that El Capitan will be the first major OS version I've ever skipped. I recall seeing that the initial upgrade numbers were low, but I didn'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'm missing out on, if there's anything cool.
22 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 62.0 ms ] threadI'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.).
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.
1: http://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/
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).
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...
For those of you that might be interested in confirming or denying that the "no-name" version of MenuMeters does not contain any malicious code... Here are some links:
Original: http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/download/MenuMeters.tar...
Base of the fork: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/archive/f71e581819e3d...
You need to confirm that the base of the fork is a 1:1 exact match with the original.
If it is and you accept that, then here are all the differences between the latest version on github[1] and the original: https://github.com/yujitach/MenuMeters/compare/f71e581819e3d...
Footnotes:
1. That link is a moving target. If new commits come in today (or tomorrow), it will change.
2. This project has a health ecosystem of forks, some of which have newer commits than the one linked to in this HN thread.
3. Not like y'all ain't gonna download binaries to your macs anyway!
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.
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.
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).
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.