Apple’s move away from overlapping windows in Mission Control has proved to be a good move. It was jarring at first, but now we’re used to it. For us, San Francisco is bolder and friendlier and more space-efficient. Moving from Helvetica to San Francisco was a big move for Apple (a system font replacement permutations throughout the whole system). The ability to add videos, audio and PDFs have helped transform Notes into a throwaway text tool and a useful app.

The ability to create lists in Notes is a bonus, and we often use if for quick disposable lists of items (such as a shopping list). The update to Notes 4, in particular, has brought us to the app and away from rivals (such as Wunderlist or Evernote). Notes is much improved, as is Mission Control we like the new system font (a more significant change than that might sound) and the ‘shake to find’ cursor feature is brilliantly useful.Ī mixed bag, then, but overall the speed bump is the biggest thing we were looking for from this update, and El Capitan delivers in that regard. New features, as we said, are fairly thin on the ground, but there are some goodies in there. Disk Utility has lost some features that we will miss, such as the ability to repair permissions and create RAID disks. Spotlight remains – in our subjective experience – sluggish, as does the Mac App Store. (Still, our optimism here points to another pleasing development: the speed and frequency of updates we’ve seen since El Cap first launched.)

El Capitan is certainly faster than Yosemite, but it’s dogged by reliability issues. We hoped that El Capitan would be a sort of modern Snow Leopard: an OS with relatively few new features but much faster and more reliable performance compared to its predecessor. Some features remain buggy and unreliable four months on.

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