New version of Mac desktop operating system will concentrate on speed, reliability and battery life with intelligent search

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Apple announced the latest update to its OS X desktop software on Monday, which the company says will make it faster and easier to use.

OS X 10.11 El Capitan, named after a mountain within Yosemite national park, will be available as a free update in the autumn.

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Apple’s Craig Federighi said it was going to be the fastest version of OS X to date: “It’s up to 1.4x faster and we’ve seen it twice as snappy switching between apps.”

The company has rewritten parts of the operating system to optimise it, extending battery life and making existing computers feel faster. It will be able to open PDF documents four times faster, for instance.

Apple brought its Metal graphics system from its iOS to the Mac, which Epic Games, developers of the Unreal graphics engine used by many of today’s top games, said was significantly faster and less processor intensive for rendering intensive graphics.

Spotlight, Apple’s search engine, also so an upgrade with semantic searches.

“Users can search for “documents I worked on last June” and it will find all the documents created in June last year on your Mac,” said Federighi.

Apple has improved window management in El Capitan, including the ability to size windows to half the screen, something Microsoft’s Windows has had baked in for years but requires a third-party app such as Moom or manual rearrangement on Yosemite.

Federighi said the company had made many hundreds of small changes to the rest of Apple’s core apps, including Safari which can now pin tabs within the tab bar in the corner and can load instantly.

