There's really no reason to review El Capitan, the latest version of Mac OS X. Partly because there aren't really a lot of big changes—a new Notes app, transit directions in Maps, split-screen views for full-screen apps, a neat thing that makes your cursor huge so you can see it immediately. Good, great, grand, wonderful. You should upgrade if you can, if for no other reason than it's free and it's an important security update. And the wallpaper looks nice.
In a broader, more hold-hands-and-think-about-the-world sort of way, though, El Capitan is important. It's a big step toward an inevitable unification, when OS X and iOS combine their powers to become the Captain Planet of mobile operating systems.
This isn't going to happen the way we think, at least not anytime soon. There's probably not going to be an iOS-powered MacBook in the next couple of years, and the iPad Pro 2 won't be running OS X. Neither of those devices will obviate the other, either. What's going to happen instead—in fact, what's already happening—is that everything will just blur together. Names won't matter, really; all your stuff will exist everywhere, and you'll interact with it in whatever way feels comfortable.
Even more than Yosemite, El Capitan feels like Apple has figured out where Mac users now come from. For years, decades even, your Mac was the hub of your life. It was your primary computer. Now, for most people, that's the iPhone. You use other devices, but you increasingly expect the rest of the world to look like your iPhone. And that includes your Mac.
That's why El Capitan makes it easier for users to sync their data and settings across all of their devices, and use the same apps the same ways in every place. It makes it easier for developers to build apps for every screen and platform. All that's different is the interface: Over here everything will be optimized for a touchscreen, over there for a keyboard and trackpad. (And soon enough, over there, a TV remote.)
Some examples are just blindingly obvious. Metal, Apple's graphics-enhancing software suite that it created for iOS 8, now works on the Mac too—that means power-user apps like Adobe After Effects and any of the 12 decent games that support Macs can run better, but it also means developers will have an easier time moving their games from iOS to Mac and vice-versa. The same system font, San Francisco, now exists across all platforms. There's a Find My Friends widget now (sorry if that's one of the apps your've been judiciously hiding in iOS). In Mail, you can swipe on the trackpad to quickly delete or archive an email. You can use full-screen apps side by side.
Photos on OS X is both functionally and aesthetically a lot more like Photos on iOS than iPhoto. You can still do a lot of iPhoto-y things, of course—those features are just stuck behind a menu now. Force Touch, a feature not unlike 3D Touch on the iPhone (and, let's be honest, it'll probably be turned into 3D Touch soon enough), works on new Macs and has APIs developers can tap into. And the Share menu, Apple's way of moving stuff between apps—first on the iPhone, now on the Mac—might start to figure more prominently into your life than ever.
As with iOS 9, Notes is a centerpiece new feature of El Capitan. (See how these things are coming together?) It's not just an app for taking notes in meetings, it's a hub for everything. In apps all over your Mac, you can now click on the box with the arrow sticking out of it to send just about anything—a photo, a link, a file—into Notes. There's a so-called Attachment Browser in the app, which you can use to sort things by file type rather than in reverse-chronological order.
It's a sortable, flexible way to store all your stuff and get back to it later. Sounds a lot like Finder, right? The kind of file system we've all used for decades, where we give things coded names and shove them into endlessly nested folders that you can't access from anywhere else, doesn't make sense on mobile. And so, it doesn't make sense for the future of the Mac, either. Something like Notes—available across platforms, totally multimedia, made for things to be combined and separated and endlessly modified—fits a lot better. That two-faced smiley Finder guy still lurks in the dock of El Capitan, but Apple clearly hopes you don't need him much.
So many of Apple's software improvements are intended to make sure all your stuff is everywhere (which still doesn't work all that well, because iCloud remains terrible), and to make it easier to find whatever you're looking for. It's almost surprising that Siri isn't included in El Capitan, though leave it to Apple to be the last to decide talking to your computer is okay. Spotlight, though, continues to become more useful—and more like Siri. Both in its own window and in the Safari address bar, Spotlight can deliver sports scores, look up basic information, and find the weather for you. It's not nearly as good at complicated things, and it's ludicrously slow on my three-year-old iMac (though, it's fine on my year-old MacBook Pro), but it's another good tool for surfacing the things spread across your laptop. At least, until you just give up and use Notes full-time.
When you install El Capitan—which, again, you probably will and definitely should—there will be no huge shock. In fact, to most users, El Capitan might feel more useful and natural than ever. The reason why is simple: El Capitan is the most OS X has ever been like your iPhone. The next version of OS X might not be called iOS 10, but the name doesn't matter. The Mac, like the iPad, the Watch, the TV, and the really huge iPad, is now just another screen size. Your computer's in your pocket.
