Read next: The OS X El Capitan review.

Get ready to scale El Capitan. The latest version of Apple's OS X operating system for Macs will be shipping from September 30th, according to a demo email message shown briefly onstage at this year's product keynote and later confirmed on Apple's site. The update, which has been available as public beta since July, is a relatively small update for OS X, focusing on two major areas: "Experience" and "Performance." The former is all about integrating Apple's own apps more tightly than ever before (rewarding people who use the company's own products rather than third-party offerings), while the latter is about, well, faster performance.

That sure looks like a ship date to us.

While the look and feel of El Capitan stay extremely close to Yosemite, there are a few small tweaks such as a new system font named San Francisco. Some of the bigger changes include a new "Split View" that makes it easier to view two windows side by side (it works similar to split-screen apps in Windows 8), and the introduction of natural language search in Spotlight that lets you find items with search strings like "picture I took last week." Mail and Safari have a few new updates too (pinned tabs!), and Notes has got a more substantial upgrade with better options for formatting and attachments. And, best of all, it's free.

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Verge Video: Mac OS X El Capitan preview