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Office 2016 Proving Unstable With Apple's El Capitan
An anonymous reader writes: Users of Microsoft Office on the Mac are reporting widespread instabilities and conflicts after upgrading to the latest version of the Apple desktop operating system, El Capitan. The first indications that El Capitan and Office 2016 were not working well together came in a now epic thread at Microsoft Community. Many users have surmised that new restrictions in file permissions in El Capitan caused the problems initially, though nearly all agree that Office's Outlook email client is the critical point of failure in the current round of application crashes and loss of functionality.
It's the iOS-ification of OS X. They're changing the driver model and moving to a "rootless" model where the root account still exists but no longer has access to everything. There is now a list of files you can't change on OS X - at all. This includes the entirety of /bin and /usr, OS X specific things like /System, and random other things like /Applications/Photos.app.
What this means is that people who create third party utilities that hook into OS X via non-Apple-approved ways can no longer do so in El Capitan, and the user has no way to "jailbreak" their Mac to allow them anyway. (That's not entirely true, there is still a method to disable this new iOS-style lockdown, but it involves booting off El Capitan install media. Which Apple doesn't distribute.)
This new locked-down OS X is just the start of forcing all apps to go through the App Store and it's the cause of this Office bug and pretty much every other problem people are having with El Capitan. Since El Capitan offers basically no user visible changes (just backend ones like locking down your own computer from you), there's literally no reason to "upgrade." Basically, Apple pulled a Windows 10.