Mac OS X El Capitan preview

At WWDC 2015 last week, Apple unveiled the next version of Mac OS X, El Capitan. It’s coming this fall, and there will be a public beta beginning sometime in July. It will be free for all users.

In the yearly cadence of OS releases, roughly every other one ends up being smaller — and El Capitan is the “small” one. But inside those releases are signposts that point to the future direction of the OS. With El Capitan, we have the usual performance improvements and bug fixes, but there are also a lot of app updates. And when you look at how Apple is updating them, you can detect a theme: they're getting way better at talking to each other.

There's a growing set of things that a modern user expects to be able to do on any platform — be it phone or tablet or laptop. Once you get beyond the basics of email and calendar, you run into gaps. Most power users find a suite of third-party apps to fill them in: maybe you use Evernote for enhanced notes, Dropbox for cloud storage, Google Maps for transit, and some kind of enhanced email app. With El Capitan, Apple is beginning to make a case that you don't need to resort to those third-party options.