“Don’t think that public betas make software any better. They don’t,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes for ZDNet. “The only way to shake out the bugs from something as big as an operating system is real world usage.”
“It’s taken ten weeks and two major updates, but finally OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’ is ready for prime time. I’ve now rolled it out to my work machines, and I’m pleased with the result,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “Bugs – especially related to stability and connectivity – I can do without, especially on my workhorse systems, so I stuck with OS X 10.10 until the other day when Apple released the 10.11.2 update. I’d been keeping a close eye on the beta of this release and had found it to be promising. So when 10.11.2 was released, I took the plunge and upgraded all my work Macs.”
Kingsley-Hughes writes, “And they’re all running flawlessly.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Public betas actually do make software better. They just don’t usually squash all of the bugs.
Indeed it’s a combination of the two that works with timing the other vital ingredient.
“date last opened” stopped working for me, and usually doesn’t work. It doesn’t update when I open a file. Not sure if I have a problem with my setup or if it’s an El Capitan problem. Anyone else have this problem?
UI sux. Still not ready for prime time.
Well, if you the UI as a gauge, OS X hasn’t been ready for prime time since Mountain Lion. 😜
+1
I won’t upgrade my production computers to El Crapitan until they get the search dialog fixed when you hit file open. It does not default to selected folder and when it does find my search criteria, the files are grayed out and don’t allow me to select one to open it. Don’t have this problem with Yosemite. Sorry Apple but you are slipping BADLY!
I’m sorry to say but iTunes is still a disaster. It takes agens to open or to rip a CD (4 hours and more…). BTW 40.000 songs in my lifetime-library.
Clearly you need a newer machine, or perhaps you need to clean up your existing one. My 2013 iMac, iTunes runs perfectly, and fast.
The CD ripping problem might be an aging CD drive that is getting read errors.
– Put the dam scroll arrows back. This is not an iPhone and I don’t look at massive Excel files on my iPhone.
– Gray text on white. Stupid stupid stupid. Fix it.
– Option for old Label function to highlight the entire name or line in the color picked. Not just a small dot.
– System Preferences > General > Click the “Always” dial next to Show Scroll Bars.
– In same section, Appearance, I checked the top box “Use dare menu and Dock
– Apple is not going to bring back full labels, and 3rd party tools that used to restore similar functionality won’t work due to System Integrity Protection (SIP). I don’t advise to disable SIP to use one of the tools, but maybe
Often SIP just needs to be disabled to do the installation and then can be reenabled. Personally, I’m avoiding El Cap until Apple fixes my iCloud account. It’s been 14 months and I wouldn’t want to do anything to confuse the poor engineers more than they already are.
Yes, that’s what you have to do as a user now. But it’s not acceptable. In daylight, I can’t even see the damn grey scroll indicator on the scroll bar, and Ive with his head up his bum hasn’t seen fit to offer me the option to change the color, or the width, of the scroll bar. He also took away window borders, which makes resizing windows a pain in the ass. NOTHING in the OS X GUI has improved since Snow Leopard. All the shit done since Ive’s disastrous iOS 7 rollout has been a user interface disaster. It is harder to use and harder to read and less intuitive. On a big screen Mac, there is no reason to hide all the useful interface features !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
All this is saying is update to El Capitan because it won’t break anything. That’s not a very compelling reason. I can get that with far more certainty by just not updating OS X.
I looked at Apple.com’s El Capitan page in search of a more compelling reason to upgrade. Their headline new feature is “Split View.” Two apps, side by side – cool story, bro. It’s better than just having two app windows because … you know, that parts not very clear to me. What else you got? New Safari features – yeah, but I don’t really use that browser. In fact, my browser already has all those features that are new to Safari. Spotlight changes! Yeah, but Spotlight is good enough right now for what I use. And I thought Spotlight was better Snow Leopard, just because it was in the top right of the screen, instead of in the center of the screen, where it blocks whatever the content I was looking at when I decided to look something up in Spotlight. El Capitan’s Spotlight update doesn’t even change that one thing about Spotlight that annoys me – it’s still blocks center of the screen.
Is that it? Why did they even bother to make a major OS update out of this?
I guess I’ll update to El Capitan in about a year, just to avoid falling behind in app compatibility. That should hopefully be enough time for Apple to really really make sure El Capitan doesn’t break anything.
Wasn’t 10.11 supposed to be a stability release? Like snow leopard was for leopard?
Good point. If it’s just a more stable and faster version of 10.10.5, than I probably shouldn’t wait so long to make the leap. Will look into it more in early 2016. My job’s probably giving me a new computer soon, so I might not actually have choice!
In all fairness, Snow Leopard was pretty buggy when it first came out. The now legendary 10.6.8 was released 23 months later. If Apple keeps to its current schedule, El Cap will be at 10.11.4 or .5 when its replacement is released. Apple needs to give an OS time to mature rather than putting it on a schedule.
Exccept when it worked just fine on release day
El Capitan worked great for me, and my customers on day one.
So when 10.11.2 was released, I took the plunge and upgraded all my work Macs.
How amusing! I’ve been doing the same thing today. It’s the best thing since 10.9.5, which I’ve stubbornly stuck to since it too represented a matured version of OS X. Bleh on Yosemite.
There’s just too many reported problems that’s preventing me from moving over to El Capitan.
However my problem is that I want to buy a new iMac and I just cannot do that until many of these problems are fixed.
I’m running Mavericks on my 2007 iMac and it just works (except for iTunes and the spinning beach ball which I’ve largely overcome by using a linked player).
This was meant to be a “Snow Leopard” type update but it’s far from that. Do I have to wait for 10.11.3 until I buy another Mac? This is just crap. And here’s the rub. When I bought my last iMac in 2007 I had the reseller downgrade the OS from Leopard to Tiger (and that caused a major s…fight with the reseller). When Snow Leopard was released I jumped at the update.
The problem is far from new and it was there under Steve Jobs but (and it’s a big but), the problem has gotten worse. Maybe Mac users just aren’t all that important to Apple any more. I just don’t get it. I’ve been a loyal Mac user since 1993 but where’s the Quid Pro Quo?
The CEO reassures us that Mac users are important to Apple but with the ongoing lack of quality with the releases I really have to ask the question “Just how important are mac users to Apple?”
It’s just not the lack of quality updates, it’s the user interface that sucks. Computers that have to be ridiculously thin. Soldered RAM, unless you buy a top of the line iMac. However you can always buy Apple RAM at exorbitant prices. What about users who know how to upgrade their own RAM by using a screw driver? So now I’m forced to buy a Skylake based iMac so I can save on RAM. Perhaps dumbing down the user interface goes hand in hand with dumbing down the hardware as well.
I could go on and on but I just feel like I’m wasting my time. In a few years I guess Apple will be a world dominated by iOS and that’s just not acceptable. So my next iMac purchase will be my last because there won’t be any iMacs to buy. That’s just plain sad.
I updated to 10.11.3. Uh oh…
Now my computer is a total mess. It’s a 21.5in iMac (late 2013) with 8gb ram. Many of my extensions (in the menu bar) are missing, can’t open the System Preferences, opening the applications window in the finder takes 12 minutes (278 files) for the icons to appear, they’re all generic. Apps won’t open (error message “damaged or incomplete”). Since I can’t access the preference panes, I can’t restore from my 10.11.2 backup on the time machine HD.
WTF?!?!