For nearly two decades, the release of a new PC operating system was an event. Upgrading cost money; you had to go to the store to get the necessary floppy disk or a CD; the new OS was expected to be different and better in basically every way. I’ll never forget the first time I booted Windows XP, or the day I finally got to jump again to Windows 7.

The last few years, Apple’s taken a decidedly simpler approach. It still rents event space and touts the new features, but your new operating system arrives more like an tune-up than a new car. You open the app store, click a button, and poof: a few things change but everything stays mostly the same.

This year’s model, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, is a little different. It comes with a stylistic overhaul, a new and cleaner coat of paint for your Mac. And it improves most of Apple’s built-in apps, from Mail to Maps and everything in between. But the reason Yosemite feels bigger, more important, is that it feels like the beginning of something new for Apple. OS X still looks like OS X, but Yosemite turns your Mac into more than just a PC. It turns it into both hub and spoke of a constantly connected, conversing ecosystem of Apple products, in which you’re able to do anything you want on any device you want.

Yosemite doesn’t promise to make my Mac look like my iPhone; it promises to make them work together constantly. Perfectly.

That would be a big event.



Our original preview of Yosemite, from July. It took about six hours for me to mostly forget that I was using Yosemite. That’s not to say it doesn’t look different — it does. It’s just that the new look feels familiar, only slightly more refined, like the finished version of what came before. After downloading and installing the update (which took about 25 minutes and a little over 5GB of disk space), I had a new wallpaper, the mountain face against pink and purple sky. All the fonts were suddenly a little smaller and a lot more Helvetica Neue (and also pretty pixelated unless I was on a Retina screen). All the icons were a little flatter. I’d love to say I have feelings about the translucency in the sidebars and menu bars of Apple’s apps, which shows a bit of the app behind whatever you’re looking at, but I don’t. I stopped noticing it almost immediately. (Of course, that’s partly because a lot of apps haven’t even updated to support translucency yet. You can also turn it off really easily.) It’s a cleaner, calmer, more balanced look that I like a lot, even if I did change my background immediately. But there’s still a dock at the bottom of my screen, still a menu bar at the top, still the same settings and options and gestures and keyboard shortcuts. Yosemite is a new look — but it’s not a new idea. Yosemite only changed a few things about the way I use my Mac. Some are small: there’s no "full-screen" button in the top right corner of the window, you just press the green button in the stoplight menu. Spotlight doesn’t pop up in the corner of your screen, but in the center, in a gray window like Alfred. I have a fraught relationship with the new Spotlight, by the way: it’s much more powerful, showing movie times and map results and topical Wikipedia pages, but it can’t do a simple Google search, and it would rather show me emails that reference Taylor Swift than actually help me play "Out Of The Woods." Spotlight is so close to right, but I still use Alfred every time. The biggest change was that I started using Safari again. A lot. Safari is so incredibly fast to load pages that I almost think it’s cheating. The list of frequently visited sites that appears every time you click on the address bar is incredibly handy, as is the visual tab switcher. I’m a habitual opener of hundreds of tabs, and I’ve never found an easier way to wade through the morass and find what I’m looking for. If you’re not forever married to another browser, Safari is very much worth a shot. It looks different… and yet the same For all the talk of convergence and of the ever-shrinking gap between PC and smartphone and tablet, Yosemite almost makes a statement in its lack of fundamental change. It’s not Windows 10, with big ideas about how our devices are just different sizes of the same thing, how the interface and settings and apps should be consistent everywhere. Microsoft believes in a single experience for all devices; Apple believes every device ought to have its own. This is still a PC operating system, made for devices with mice and keyboards and trackpads. It feels outdated in places – the whole idea of the "desktop" just feels pointless, and saving and organizing files is still more complex than it should be in the age of limitless searchable cloud storage — but it’s true to what Apple believes in. Plus, there’s a lot more to Yosemite than the desktop. The best features, the most important and innovative features, do affect every device you own — as long as you own Apple devices. They don’t all look or work the same, but they work together better than ever.

If you’re using an iPhone or iPad running iOS 8.1 and a Mac running Yosemite, have Bluetooth on, and are logged into the same iCloud account and Wi-Fi network on both devices, your devices will suddenly begin to constantly talk to each other. After a surprisingly convoluted setup process (you need to change settings in three different apps on two different platforms, and enter a passcode), when your phone rings, so does your Mac. You can actually even make and receive calls from your computer, which has more than once saved me from missing calls while digging for my phone in my bag. AirDrop finally works between Mac and iOS, meaning you can easily send photos and files between phone and computer. (FINALLY.) You can remotely activate the personal hotspot feature on the iPhone and use it to connect your Mac to the internet, which I’ve already needed a few times because Time Warner Cable is a nightmare. My favorite feature of the Continuity group, and probably the thing about Yosemite that most changed how I go about my day, is that Messages now lets you send SMS text messages from your computer. That means I can finally text my Moto X-toting girlfriend without having to constantly pick up and put down my phone. It’s already made me more likely to quickly (or ever) respond to someone’s texts. Messages do still occasionally sit in the iMessage hell of existing on one device but not others, but I can’t overstate how much I like texting from my laptop. Sharing data between devices is automatic, once you get the setup right, and surprisingly pervasive. Whenever you open a new tab on your Mac, or start composing an email or text, an icon appears in the bottom left corner of the iPhone’s lock screen; swipe it up and you’ll go right to where you were on your PC. It works the opposite way, too, the icon showing up to the left of your dock on the Mac. It doesn’t always work the way I expected, though; there’s no rhyme or reason to when in the message-composition process the icon will appear on my phone, and sometimes the icon on my Mac opens Chrome but not a new page. Everything works most of the time, but it’s not quite seamless yet. When Continuity works, it’s amazing As long as they work, all these features together make the case for buying a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad better than Apple ever has before. iTunes wasn’t compelling enough; neither were any previous iterations of iCloud. Now, the three devices feel synced and aligned in a totally automatic, uncomplicated way. I can do anything from anywhere, each device suited best to certain things. (This is the idea Windows had long ago, and I hope Microsoft is taking a few notes on execution.) Next, I hope more apps start to take advantage, letting me move image edits and my spot in videos and the like between devices. This is a killer feature with huge possibilities, and I hope Apple and its developers all make real use of it.