WWDC 2015: Apple Mac OS X El Capitan Looks To Build On Yosemite Success

Apple will release El Capitan, the next version of Mac OS X, in the Autumn, promising to ‘refine’ the radical changes introduced in the previous iteration, OS X Yosemite.

Craig Federighi senior vice president of software engineering said development of El Capitan, named after a mountain in Yosemite National Park, focused on improving the performance and experience of Yosemite rather than introducing a raft of new features.

“We’ve optimised performance throughout the system,” he told the audience at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, claiming El Capitan offered 1.3 times faster app launching, is twice as quick switching apps and opening email and opens a preview of a PDF file four times as fast. “But we’ve also made deep architectural improvements.”

OS X El Capitan

This includes the addition of the Metal architecture, first introduced to iOS last year, which allows for 50 percent faster graphics rendering, a 40 percent reduction in CPU use. This not only offers faster performance and superior graphics but also lower power consumption, Federighi said.

El Capitan introduces ‘San Francisco’, a new font designed for Retina display machines, , streamlined built-in apps and more intelligent Spotlight search. For example, users can ask real language questions to search for files, photos or the web, such as ‘documents I worked on last June’

Users can now ‘snap’ windows similar to Microsoft Windows and even create multiple desktops with different snap configurations, while there are easy options to mute Safari, pin tabs in the browser and find the cursor when you first log on.

“El Capitan is available to all of you developers today,” added Federighi. “We’ll be doing public beta once again in July and we’ll be rolling out to everyone this fall.”

Apple couldn’t resist a sly dig at Windows, noting that 55 percent of all Macs are now running Yosemite less than a year after release, compared to just seven percent of all Windows machines running Windows 8 after a much a longer period. The company claims Yosemite has the fastest adoption rate of any PC operating system ever released.

iOS 9, which works together with Mac OS X, was also shown off at WWDC, as was watchOS 2, the operating system behind the recently released Apple Watch.

How well do you know Apple? Take our quiz!