John Siracusa’s OS X Yosemite review

Apple officially released OS X Yosemite today, and to mark that occasion – as has become tradition among our people – the only OS X Yosemite review you need, from John Siracusa.

OS X and iOS have been trading technologies for some time now. For example, AVFoundation, Apple’s modern framework for manipulating audiovisual media, was released for iOS a year before it appeared on OS X. Going in the other direction, Core Animation, though an integral part of the entire iPhone interface, was released first on the Mac. Yosemite’s new look continues the pattern; iOS got its visual refresh last year, and now it’s OS X’s turn.

But at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple made several announcements that point in a new direction: iOS and OS X advancing in lockstep, with new technologies that not only appear on both platforms simultaneously but also aim to weave them together.

These new, shared triumphs run the gamut from traditional frameworks and APIs to cloud services to the very foundation of Apple’s software ecosystem, the programming language itself. Apple’s dramatic leadership restructuring in 2012 put Federighi in charge of both iOS and OS X – a unification of thought that has now, two years later, resulted in a clear unification of action. Even the most ardent Mac fan will admit that iOS 7 was a bigger update than Mavericks. This time around, it’s finally a fair fight.

Grab some tea or coffee, and enjoy.

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