I&#x27;m running on a 2012 Mac Mini Core i7 with 16GB of ram with a spinning rust hard drive.<p>El Capitan has sped up the OS for me compared to the previous OS X release. Yosemite was so bad that I found myself avoiding using my Mac Mini instead using my rMBP with an SSD because the Mac Mini just felt so incredibly slow. With El Capitan they feel similar to me. Certain disk operations of course are slower, but overall the usability has increased under El Capitan versus Yosemite.<p>Based upon informal replies on Twitter when I posted about my upgrade experience, I wasn&#x27;t the only one that noticed a distinct speedup compared to Yosemite on older hardware.