Installed El Capitan on my on my home Mac Mini and I’m loving it.
The biggest thing I notice, sadly, is the new beach ball. It’s much nicer. Did we get this in Yosemite? I don’t think so.
Pinned tabs in Safari are also nice. I get that their very late to the game on this one, but just saying it’s nice to have.
It’s not ground breaking, nor does it feel like everything is so much better, but I’ve got some nice new features to play with and overall, the install went smooth.
I did have a few oddities during the upgrade.
First the install took like an hour. It said it’d be a half hour, but I knew not to believe that.
When it booted into El Capitan it first asked me for my iCloud password and then nothing. Literally a blank screen with arrows that didn’t work. I let it sit there for a while and then I just quit the setup. The good news is you can do that. It then went to the desktop and I was in.
The first thing I noticed was that Mail was open. Not sure how or why, but it was. To make it worse, it was loading email from all my Gmail accounts that I had setup in the Accounts system preference. There were multiple accounts setup, but none were setup to download email. So I had gigs of email being downloaded!
Of course when you install El Capitan, Spotlight needs to re-index everything. So not only was it trying to download years worth of Gmail messages, but it was also indexing. Indexing slows the computer to a crawl.
Luckily I had Time Machine disconnected. Once I plugged it back in, it found 83 gigs worth of data to backup. This doesn’t include all that email it wasn’t suppose to download as I tossed that out.
iTunes was also a little problematic. I think it was just bad timing as I was getting iTunes Music Store errors. Eventually they just disappeared and all is well again.
I know, I’m only reporting the bad things right? Well that’s what’s sticking out right now.
Honestly, I haven’t had any issues with non-Apple apps. Those that did could be because I didn’t update before upgrading.
Of note, if you’re using WebStorm or PHPStorm, make sure to go and download the version with JDK 1.8 otherwise you’ll run into Java issues just like we did with Yosemite.
I don’t have an in-depth review as I haven’t used El Capitan much. I upgraded my home machine because it wasn’t my main machine that I do development on. If things don’t work, it’s easy to get around. I won’t update my work machine for a few weeks; or until I get a green light from the company.
It’s always nice to get the free system update from Apple and there’s always something good about every one of them. Upgrading went pretty smooth overall so if you’re itching to do it, go for it.
