Safari is so incredibly fast to load pages that I almost think it’s cheating. The biggest change was that I started using Safari again. I have a fraught relationship with the new Spotlight, by the way: it’s much more powerful, showing movie times and map results and topical Wikipedia pages, but it can’t do a simple Google search, and it would rather show me emails that reference Taylor Swift than actually help me play 'Out Of The Woods.' Spotlight is so close to right, but I still use Alfred every time.

Spotlight doesn’t pop up in the corner of your screen, but in the center, in a gray window like Alfred. Some are small: there’s no 'full-screen' button in the top right corner of the window, you just press the green button in the stoplight menu. Yosemite only changed a few things about the way I use my Mac. Yosemite is a new look - but it’s not a new idea. But there’s still a dock at the bottom of my screen, still a menu bar at the top, still the same settings and options and gestures and keyboard shortcuts. It’s a cleaner, calmer, more balanced look that I like a lot, even if I did change my background immediately. (Of course, that’s partly because a lot of apps haven’t even updated to support translucency yet.

I stopped noticing it almost immediately. I’d love to say I have feelings about the translucency in the sidebars and menu bars of Apple’s apps, which shows a bit of the app behind whatever you’re looking at, but I don’t. All the fonts were suddenly a little smaller and a lot more Helvetica Neue (and also pretty pixelated unless I was on a Retina screen). After downloading and installing the update (which took about 25 minutes and a little over 5GB of disk space), I had a new wallpaper, the mountain face against pink and purple sky. It’s just that the new look feels familiar, only slightly more refined, like the finished version of what came before. That’s not to say it doesn’t look different - it does. It took about six hours for me to mostly forget that I was using Yosemite. Our original preview of Yosemite, from July.

Macbook pro os x yosemite slow