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I have a 7 years old iMac running Snow Leopard. I know Apple has stopped supporting Snow Leopard for some time, and I am considering upgrade to the latest El Capitan. My iMac meets all the hardware requirements. My main concern is the reliability of El Captian, since there are some negative reviews saying that El Captian has WIFI connection issues among other things. Some people even said they would rather stay with Snow Leopard without updating.
How is your experience with El Capitan? Any issues? Do you see big improvement over Snow Leopard?
El Capitan is on its sixth major upgrade, 10.11.6. It's solid and stable. The decision of whether to upgrade depends on the RAM in the machine. I probably wouldn't take a Mac to El Capitan unless it had at least 8 GB of RAM. IMO, it really runs well at 16GB.
Here's an idea. If you have hard drive space space to spare, create a 100 GB partition with Disk Utility and install El Capitan on that. Then hold down the <option> key at startup to select which OS you want to boot into. You can test how El Capitan performs on your Mac, without giving up the ability to put things right back to the way they were.
Sierra just came out this week. It will probably have issues. I'm not sure it runs on any 7 year-old hardware.
Thank you so much, Bo. This is a great idea. Apple website says El Capitan needs 2 GB only. Anyway, my iMac has 4 GB RAM now, and I will upgrade it to 8 GB to boost performance.
Thank you so much, Bo. This is a great idea. Apple website says El Capitan needs 2 GB only. Anyway, my iMac has 4 GB RAM now, and I will upgrade it to 8 GB to boost performance.
Yes, it would. But it will run fine on 4GB. My laptop only has 4GB of RAM, and the OS is fast and efficient as they come. Not a single glitch. You. can buy RAM from Crucial if you like, and probably Newegg
I have a mid-2007 iMac with only 4GB of RAM and it runs just fine. My iMac itself, however, is finally showing its age and I'm waiting to switch to the new MacBook Pro when it comes out... hopefully sometime next month.
El Capitan is on its sixth major upgrade, 10.11.6. It's solid and stable. The decision of whether to upgrade depends on the RAM in the machine. I probably wouldn't take a Mac to El Capitan unless it had at least 8 GB of RAM. IMO, it really runs well at 16GB.
Here's an idea. If you have hard drive space space to spare, create a 100 GB partition with Disk Utility and install El Capitan on that. Then hold down the <option> key at startup to select which OS you want to boot into. You can test how El Capitan performs on your Mac, without giving up the ability to put things right back to the way they were.
Sierra just came out this week. It will probably have issues. I'm not sure it runs on any 7 year-old hardware.
I have an early 2008 MacBook Pro, and I am running the latest version of El Capitan and will not be able to upgrade to Sierra. Trying to decide if I should get a new MacBook Pro.....
I have an early 2008 MacBook Pro, and I am running the latest version of El Capitan and will not be able to upgrade to Sierra. Trying to decide if I should get a new MacBook Pro.....
Note that anything after the 2012 non-retina have very limited expansion capability - soldered RAM, proprietary SSD. Just keep that in mind.
If you don't care about retina the mid-2012 can still be purchased through Apple Refurbished for $829. Warranted and AppleCare eligible.
For another $500 or so you can upgrade to 16GB and a 1TB SSD. For $200 probably 8GB and a 500GB SSD.
Thanks so much for the tip! That will save me quite a bit of money.
My pleasure. If you don't need the latest and greatest it's still a solid buy, and the upgradability cant be beat. You also still get a DVD SuperDrive built in, or if you are handy (and careful) you can mount another SSD or HDD in its place. If you look on eBay look for the MD101LL/A model. There is a slightly higher spec (I7 vs I5) old model - the MD102LL/A - which you can only find used. Not worth the difference IMHO.
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