Twas the Night before OS X Upgrade and all through the house....

All the humans were stirring, moving their mouse.

 

Now to the good stuff. Reviews of OS X El Capitan are out at Macworld and Ars Technica. They like it and think it’s a worthwhile use of your time.

 

BUT! Before you download the installer, here’s your dose of warning:

Melissia Holt at MacObserver

Roman Loyola at Macworld

 

Do BackUp. Back up to both your Time Machine external hard drive and to a clone of the hard drive or partition you intend to upgrade. 

Do It! You’ve only got 30 years of data, such as  your tax returns, your wedding videos, and all those college papers you typed into an Apple ][e long ago. So back those up. 

As far as I know, no killer app now or on the horizon demands that  you upgrade NOW! You may want to wait until 10.11.2 or 10.11.3, so the bugs can be worked out. And there will be bugs. It’s inevitable.

BUT! and I apologize for shouting in all caps, plenty of old apps, particularly if you still use 10.6.8, will cease to work due to their dependence on old PowerPC code that 10.6.8 supported through the Rosetta technology that Apple scrapped in 10.7 and above. So read Melissa Holt and Roman Loyola again. 

 

Finally, when you do download El Capitan and want to make a USB flash drive installer, how do you do it? Well, this article at Ars Technica is the first one I’ve seen.

Oh, and if you don’t want to write a long line of code, copy it from the browser window and paste it into the Terminal. 

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog