“Yosemite and iOS 8 are the first great victories for the newly collaborative Apple,” John Siracusa writes for Ars Technica. “The visual coherence between the products blessedly obsoletes the former one-way mimicry and reflects a deeper technological unity. Features like Handoff that require cooperation in all stages of development, from conceptualization to execution, are evidence of an Apple that puts the needs of its customers ahead of departmental divisions.”
“The political and technical battles inherent in the former two-track development strategy for OS X and iOS left both products with uncomfortable feature disparities. Apple now correctly views this as damage and has set forth to repair it,” Siracusa writes. “Viewed in isolation, Yosemite provides a graphical refresh accompanied by a few interesting features and several new technologies whose benefits are mostly speculative, depending heavily on how eagerly they’re adopted by third-party developers. But Apple no longer views the Mac in isolation, and neither should you. OS X is finally a full-fledged peer to iOS; all aspects of sibling rivalry have been banished.”
“The Mac today is just one part of a conceptually, organizationally, and (increasingly) technologically unified platform that spans from wrist to workstation. The hardware-based platforms of the past remain relevant to developers, but Apple seems determined to make them much less important to its customers,” Siracusa writes. “With Yosemite, the Mac has taken its first step into a larger world.”
Massive amounts more in the full, extremely comprehensive 25-page review – recommended – here.
Related articles:
The Verge reviews Apple’s OS X Yosemite: ‘Turns your Mac into more than just a PC’ – October 18, 2014
Digital Trends reviews Apple’s OS X Yosemite: ‘The perfect desktop operating system’ – October 17, 2014