OS X El Capitan available from October 1

Australians Mac owners we be able to download El Capitan – the latest update to Apple's OS X operating system – for free on October 1. As with iOS 9, El Capitan is a smaller, incremental update designed to bolster OS X’s usability.  

"For El Capitan, we focused on two major areas – experience and performance," said Apple's head of software Craig Federighi when unveiling the new operating system in June. "We wanted to build on the strengths of Yosemite with some great refinements and advancements."

While El Capitan is light on new features – especially when compared to Yosemite – it will include a new version of Safari with the ability to pin frequently used tabs, advanced search options supporting natural language queries such as "documents I edited last June", and improved windows management with a split screen interface similar to that found in Windows 7 onward.

In terms of performance, Apple claims apps open up to 1.4 times faster in El Capitan, app switching is up to twice as fast, and PDF files open up to four times faster using Preview.