All the built-in apps look and work in similar ways, and with easy automatic exchange of data between, for example, mail messages and the calendar. El Capitan improves on Yosemite's already-strong coherence and integration. Now that Windows 10 has arrived, OS X finally has a serious rival for the title of world's best desktop-laptop operating system, but OS X is still in the lead. Read our editorial mission (Opens in a new window) & see how we test (Opens in a new window). Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. You should almost certainly accept that offer. If you have almost any Mac made in the past five years or so, the App Store will offer to update your system to El Capitan at no charge. OS X El Capitan looks subtly different from its predecessor, Yosemite, but everything you know about using Yosemite still works in El Capitan-except that El Capitan is refreshingly faster in everything it does. This time around, Apple has released OS X El Capitan only two weeks after iOS 9, and the operating systems are more tightly connected than ever before.īoth new versions show Apple at its best-again upgrading its operating systems in a way that adds worthwhile new power without making users stumble over a steep learning curve. A few years ago, Apple's phone-and-tablet operating system, iOS, was always a few months out of sync with OS X, so the features on your phone never entirely matched the features on your Mac. With the release of OS X 10.11 El Capitan, the latest version of Cupertino's desktop-and-laptop OS, the Apple ecosystem gets tighter than ever.

New security features may break a few special-purpose apps.

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