Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite – 8 months on…

Apple released OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” to the great unwashed in October 2014 after a long extended “public beta”. During that beta testing phase I would install it on a test partition, have a play, shrug my shoulders and generally say “meh” quite a lot. I wasn’t keen on the new User interface and most of the new functionality was Mac to iOS integration, something I don’t really need or want particularly. In keeping with my long held view, I never ever install an OS upgrade until Apple have released at least 3 “point” releases to 10.x.3. So by rights I should be using 10.10.3 on my MacBook Pro now. I’m not. Why?

Simply put it doesn’t do anything I really need. And there have been enough reports of performance slowdowns, random problems with Mail and related unreliability issues that I’m stickling with Mavericks for now.

I’ll take a look at 10.11 “El Capitan” in a bit and might end up skipping straight to that. I’m hoping that the focus on reliability and performance as opposed to new features will make OS X 10.11 the new “Snow Leopard”. OS X 10.6* is still in my opinion the high water mark of the Mac OS. Stunningly reliable, quick on old hardware, a familiar and consistent user interface and runs legacy applications.

* So good I still run it in a virtual machine for some old programs. Still bitter that the lack of security updates forced me to upgrade from 10.6.8 to 10.9.5…