MacRumors

At its Worldwide Developer's Conference last week, Apple introduced OS X 10.11 El Capitan, the newest version of its Mac-based operating system. At the time, Apple provided the software both to registered developers and to members of the media. Media reviews are hitting the web, giving us our first in-depth opinions on OS X El Capitan.

We've rounded up details from some of the best reviews in order to give MacRumors readers a look at OS X El Capitan from the perspective of people who have used it extensively over the course of the last week. Each of the reviews is worth reading in full to get a feel for how OS X El Capitan builds upon the features introduced with OS X Yosemite.

Lauren Goode, Re/code:

The most notable I've-seen-this-before feature in OS X El Capitan is Split View: Now, two apps can run in split view on a full screen. Finally! Mail and TweetDeck side by side throughout the day, on a full screen, without having to manually drag windows into place. Of course, Microsoft Windows has had this "snap" feature for years.

Jim Dalrymple, The Loop:

I use Mail a lot. Unfortunately, I've had some trouble lately with Mail on Yosemite getting stuck while checking IMAP connections, especially after I wake the computer from sleep. All I ask for in El Capitan is for that to be fixed.

The good news is that it seems much better in this beta version of the operating system. Apple said Mail in El Capitan delivers an improved IMAP engine, so I'm very hopeful. I haven't had Mail stop working yet and I'm a week into using it--that's a damn good sign.

Lance Ulanoff, Mashable:

The differences between Apple OS X Yosemite and El Capitan are so subtle that it often feels like one of those puzzles where you have to spot 11 differences between two photos. Considering Yosemite was a lauded OS overhaul, this isn't a bad thing, but the best way to sum up Apple's OS update is this: If you like Yosemite, you'll like El Capitan, too. [...]

Apple tweaked system performance to improve mail load times and application launches, but it was hard for me to tell the difference. Did it seem fast? Yes. Does Yosemite also seem fast? Yes. I did notice one very beta glitch when I unexpected ran out of system memory in El Capitan.

Darrell Etherington, TechCrunch:

Now, Apple has added a lot of muscle to Notes in 10.11, turning into a much better competitor not only for other text editors, but for things like Evernote, too. You can integrate images, PDFs, videos and other media right into notes via drag-and-drop insertion, for instance, and crate checklists out of line-separated items with a single click.

Formatting ensures that you can create headers, paragraph styles, bold and italicize text and you can attach from your Photos app directly. Open content from other apps directly in Notes, too, using the Share menu across OS X, and even add stuff like Maps locations, spreadsheets and more. Folders keep things more organized, and thumbnails provide easy identification of what's within a Note from the sidebar menu when you're including media.

Dieter Bohn, The Verge:

Why would you choose Apple's solutions in El Capitan? Because they're all so tightly integrated. Maps talks to Notes, Calendar talks to Mail, and all of them talk to Spotlight. All of those interconnections and digital conversations could subtly drive you to opt for Apple apps instead of whatever you might have been using before. Think of it like Continuity, but inside the computer instead of between devices. And all of it works incredibly well.

Dana Wollman, Engadget:

Some of my favorite updates are in Safari, though many would rightfully argue that these improvements aren't necessarily novel. In fact, some appear to take after features already offered in Chrome, and other competing browsers. For instance, there's now an option to identify which tab is playing sound. From there, you can hit a mute button on the tab itself, or click the speaker icon in the address bar. The latter option comes in handy when you have sound coming from multiple tabs -- say, a song you meant to stream, and an auto-playing video ad in the other. By clicking the sound icon in the URL bar, you can see a list of all the tabs playing sound and selectively mute the one that's bothering you.

Perhaps my favorite new feature is the addition of pinned sites. They sort of form a bookmarks bar, only better: Here, these tabs can't be closed, and because they look like shrunken buttons, they take up much less space than a regular tab.

Rene Ritchie, iMore:

Thanks to a new CoreSpotlight API, developers can now make the content in their apps, including documents, messages, and more, available to Spotlight as well. That means it'll be even easier to find what we're looking for, no matter where it's contained.

I've tried LaunchBar, Alfred, and Quicksilver, but none of them ever stuck: Spotlight has always been my go-to. Yosemite made it significantly more functional, but natural language and the new results engine promises to make it integral to the Mac experience. I'm really looking forward to using it full-time come the fall.

Other Reviews:
Ryan Smith, AnandTech
David Pierce, Wired
Ed Baig, USA Today
David Pogue, Yahoo
Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica

OS X El Capitan is currently only available to registered developers. Apple has plans to introduce a public beta test of the software in July, following that with a fall public release. For detailed information on all of the new features in OS X El Capitan, make sure to check out our El Capitan roundup.

Apple has updated its GarageBand for Mac website to confirm that the music creation software will be updated with new features on June 30 alongside the launch of Apple Music, as noted by Macworld editor Kirk McElhearn on his personal blog Kirkville. GarageBand will gain new synth sounds and the software's built-in recording and editing features will be improved.

Apple will be adding 100 shape-shifting EDM‑ and Hip Hop‑inspired synth sounds to GarageBand that each feature the Transform Pad Smart Control for morphing and tweaking sounds to your personal liking. The new controls are very similar to the Alchemy software that Apple acquired through its recent purchase of Camel Audio, known for its range of plug-ins, synthesizers, effects and sound libraries.

Some of the new synths are demoed on the GarageBand website, including Sweeping Arp, Droplets, Bright Punchy Synth, Pumping Synth Waves and Epic Hook Synth. Apple further outlines that GarageBand's software instrument Smart Controls and Piano Roll Editor will be improved, allowing changes to be captured in real time and fine-tuning of music afterwards.

"Capture your changes in real time by adjusting any of your software instruments’ Smart Controls while recording a performance," reads a caption on the GarageBand website. "You can also fine‑tune your music later in the Piano Roll Editor." A footnote lists the new features as available on June 30 in the United States and as "coming soon" in other countries, consistent with the Apple Music website.

It is possible that Apple may also add a way for GarageBand users to upload new music to Apple Music Connect, a social platform that will enable artists to connect with fans. Apple hopes that Apple Music Connect will help not only well-known musicians, but also unsigned artists, to more easily promote their music and engage with their fans through one centralized platform.

Apple vice president of iTunes content Robert Kondrk has confirmed to Re/code that the Cupertino-based company will share 71.5% of Apple Music revenue with music owners in the United States.

That number will be slightly higher outside of the United States, averaging around 73%, but Apple will pay no royalties during the three-month free trial period in return for paying a few percentage points extra.

"Apple won’t pay music owners anything for the songs that are streamed during Apple Music’s three-month trial period, a bone of contention with music labels during negotiations for the new service. But Kondrk says Apple’s payouts are a few percentage points higher than the industry standard, in part to account for the lengthy trial period; most paid subscription services offer a free one-month trial."

The payments will be primarily sent to record labels and publishers that own the rights to songs and their underlying compositions, meaning that the royalties will not necessarily line the pockets of musicians directly. Artists often have their own individual deals with the record label they are signed to, so their payouts are often dependant on the terms of their contracts.

Apple paying seven-tenths of every dollar to rights holders is the standard rate paid by other streaming music services such as market leader Spotify, although Apple Music may be more lucrative for record labels due to its absence of a free ad-supported tier. Spotify argues that Apple also offers free streaming music through iTunes Radio and its upcoming Beats 1 global radio station.

Apple Music was unveiled last week as an all-in-one streaming music service, live global radio station and social platform for artists to connect with fans. The subscription-based service will be available June 30 for $9.99 per month after a three-month free trial period for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and PC. Apple TV and Android versions of the service will be available in the fall.

iPhone developer Steven Troughton-Smith has discovered that the new iPad keyboard on iOS 9 beta is capable of scaling to a larger size with rearranged keys, providing further evidence that Apple could be planning to release the much-rumored 12.9-inch "iPad Pro" in the future.

The secondary keyboard view has also gained the new chiclet-sized row of symbols and has enough room to fit all symbols and characters on one page, potentially eliminating the need for a tertiary keyboard view normally accessed by tapping the "#+=" button on the left or right.

iOS 9's new Slide Over, Split View and Picture in Picture features on iPad Air 2 further suggest that Apple may be working on a larger iPad, as the new split-screen multitasking views would be ideal for a larger screen and could benefit from the tablet's increased processing power.

Somewhat lost among all of the announcements coming out of WWDC last week, Apple on Monday introduced a new set of colors for the Beats Powerbeats2 wireless in-ear headphones, with the new colors matching the Apple Watch sport band options of black, white, blue, green, and pink.

Carrying the same $200 price as the original Powerbeats2 introduced last June after Apple had announced it was acquiring Beats but before the deal officially closed, the new versions are identical with the exception of the new colors. The new headphones have begun showing up in Apple's retail stores, where they are being given a significant amount of promotional space.

The Powerbeats2 have received mixed reviews over the past year, with reviewers disagreeing over whether the headphones suffer from the excessive bass that has been common with Beats products over the years. The headphones come with a set of ear tips in various shapes and sizes, and the listening experience appears to vary significantly for many users depending on which tips are used.

As Bluetooth headphones, the Powerbeats2 can connect wirelessly to a wide variety of devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and now the Apple Watch. With the Apple Watch's ability to store music on the device for playback via Bluetooth and serve adequately as an exercise tracker under certain circumstances even without a paired iPhone present, wireless headphones are proving to be a popular accessory for Apple Watch owners and something Apple has clearly chosen to capitalize on with the new Powerbeats2 colors.

(Thanks, Ben!)

Before it was acquired by Apple, Beats Electronics was working on a Sonos-like Wi-Fi-connected loudspeaker that would play music from services like Pandora and Spotify straight from the Internet, reports Variety. The news comes days after learning that the new Apple Music streaming service will not immediately be compatible with Sonos speakers.

Case in point: Beats Electronics, which Apple acquired for $3 billion last year, was working on a Wifi-connected loudspeaker that could be used to play subscription music services straight from the Internet, according to multiple sources familiar with the project. That would have put Beats in direct competition with Sonos, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based speaker manufacturer succeeding with a very Apple-like product lineup.

The product was set to be launched during the holiday season of 2014 but was scrapped after Apple acquired Beats. The headphone maker was looking to first introduce a powerful speaker for the living room before introducing smaller, more affordable speakers for other rooms like kitchens and bedrooms. The speakers would incorporate Bluetooth alongside Wi-Fi and NFC to make music playback as seamless as possible when entering rooms. The biggest speaker would cost around $750, according to Variety.

Beats was looking to build the technology for the speakers from scratch, but ran into problems and had to switch chipset manufacturers and delay the project multiple times. Because of these issues, Apple decided to kill the project. However, another source tells Variety that Beats and Apple management have simply decided to put the project on hiatus.

It's unclear if or when the project will be revisited, especially as Variety reports that the workforce at Beats is far smaller than it was pre-Apple acquisition, with one source saying the headphone company is 50% smaller than before. Additionally, Beats chief product officer T.J. Grewal and head of loudspeaker engineering David Titzer have left the company, according to their LinkedIn accounts. In July 2014, it was reported that Apple trimmed 200 employees from Beats in areas where Beats and Apple overlapped.

Apple has discontinued speaker projects in the past, most famously the iPod Hi-Fi in 2007. More recently, the Cupertino company has had to recall Beats Pill XL speakers due to a possible fire hazard, with Apple issuing customers a $325 refund rather than replacing the units.

For users looking to upgrade their older Macs with third-party solid-state drives (SSDs), one issue has been a lack of support for TRIM on these drives under OS X. TRIM is a system-level command that allows the operating system and the drive to communicate about which areas of the drive are considered unused and thus ready to be erased and rewritten to. In the absence of TRIM, users can see significantly slower drive writes as the drive begins to fill up.

Officially TRIM has only been supported on Apple's drives, and while tools such as TRIM Enabler have been developed to turn on TRIM for third-party drives, they ran into issues under OS X Yosemite due to Apple's use of kext signing. With this security measure in place, users have had to disable kext signing in order to enable TRIM, and should kext signing be turned back on such as by resetting NVRAM/PRAM during troubleshooting, the user's system will refuse to boot.

Since the developer release of OS X El Capitan on Monday, a number of users interested in TRIM support have been investigating the possibilities for TRIM on third-party SSDs, particularly with the new "rootless" security features that prevent access to many system-level files.

Some users have been playing with various options involving turning off rootless temporarily in order to run utilities like TRIM Enabler, and members of our forum have discovered a simple command to enable built-in support for TRIM on third-party drives that can be enabled once rootless has been disabled. The developer behind TRIM Enabler and others have confirmed the method does work and are making plans to enhance their software to support it.

Enabling TRIM using this method does come with a warning from Apple, as it can cause issues on occasion and the company wants to make sure users are operating it at their own risk.

This tool force-enables TRIM for all relevant attached devices, even though they have not been validated for data integrity while using that functionality. By using this tool to enable TRIM, you agree that Apple is not liable for any consequences that may result, including but not limited to data loss or corruption.

Apple could certainly make changes as development on OS X El Capitan continues, but given the built-in trimforce tool it certainly appears the company intends to allow TRIM to run on third-party SSDs. The "man" documentation for the trimforce command indicates it was introduced in OS X 10.10.4, which remains in developer testing, but forum member mikeboss has determined it is not present in the current developer build.

While most users will never need to deal with this issue, upgrading to an SSD is a popular way to squeeze some more speed and life out of an older Mac, so there is a sizable community of users interested in getting TRIM to function on their third-party drives, and some of them may find TRIM a helpful tool.

(Thanks, not Jony!)

To kickoff its 2015 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple shared a humorous "Backstage" video starring Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader. Hader took on the role of David LeGary, WWDC's director, prepping for the big show.

As of this afternoon, Apple's uploaded the "Backstage" video to YouTube, giving those who missed the WWDC keynote live stream a chance to watch the opening act.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is wrapping up later this week. During the keynote event, the company debuted iOS 9, OS X 10.11, watchOS 2, and Apple Music.

Apple plans to charge between $9.99 and $14.99 per month for its upcoming on-demand Apple Music service, with 58 percent of its subscription revenues going to record labels. For every $9.99 Apple collects from subscribers in the United States, it will pay out $5.80 to labels. Additionally, Apple pays approximately 12 percent to publishers and/or songwriters, leaving the company with somewhere around 30 percent of the revenue from the Apple Music service.

The figures come from a leaked document shared by Digital Music News earlier this week. In its article, Digital Music News erroneously suggested Apple was paying less to music labels than other streaming music services like Spotify (after failing to take into account the publisher's fee), but as it turns out, the 70 percent that Apple pays out to rights holders is on par with the industry standard.

In some circumstances, the fees provided to rights holders can vary, such as when student accounts are involved or when the Apple Music service is provided through a third-party service like Google Play or bundled into a carrier package. During Apple's three-month free trial period that it provides to all subscribers, it is not required to pay any fees to rights holders.

Profit sharing and value concerns often cause a lot of tension between streaming music services, record labels, artists, and other rights holders. Many artists have complained about the low fees they receive from streaming music services, primarily those with free streaming tiers. Taylor Swift famously pulled all of her music from Spotify last year, claiming that by offering music for free, Spotify was undervaluing her work.

With Beats Music and Rhapsody you have to pay for a premium package in order to access my albums. And that places a perception of value on what I've created. On Spotify, they don't have any settings, or any kind of qualifications for who gets what music. I think that people should feel that there is a value to what musicians have created, and that's that.

Apple does not offer a free ad-supported tier for its on-demand streaming music service, choosing to supplement instead with an accompanying radio service. Apple has even allegedly urged record labels to cease offering deals to services that do offer free ad-supported listening tiers, like Spotify and YouTube.

Apple's focus on paid-only music is unsurprising, given the current state of the streaming music industry. Spotify recently announced 75 million users and 20 million paid subscribers, but Spotify continues to operate at a loss. With more than 800 million iTunes accounts with credit cards attached at its disposal, Apple Music could quickly become one of the most profitable streaming services, as long as Apple can draw in customers.

Apple Music launches on June 30 as part of iOS 8.4.