Upgrading to Yosemite a good idea?
Archives Forums/MacOS X Discussion/Upgrading to Yosemite a good idea?
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| At this moment I have a pretty old Mac Mini. It is my main system, so I can't really afford bringing it into trouble before I got the money to buy a new MacMini. Well, my finances are under supervision and my supervisor is not really giving me a clear "yes" or "no" on my question whether or not I can buy a new computer on a short notice. I guess that him constantly attempting to avoid that question means I should take that as a "no" for the time being. Anyway, now I'm on Mountain Lion, but the upgrade to Yosemite is free. Now I am very very careful. I've spoken to a lot of people with a Mac around the same age as mine (some even newer) getting into real trouble when upgrading to Mavericks which they could only fix because of a real nerd helping them to downgrade back to Mountain Lion. I do not have such a nerd at my disposal so once I step in I got no way back, and I really want to make sure my hardware specifications are good enough for Yosemite before I even think about upgrading. But on the other hand, I get more and more software coming my way requiring at least Mavericks, so if I don't upgrade I might get condemned to older versions of that software or in some cases, not even getting the software at all. Now I can program games and apps in BlitzMax quite well (I think), but when it comes to hardware I'm a total nitwit, so I'm asking you if the hardware in this old MacMini is enough to run Yosemite or if it's still wiser to wait until my financial supervisor can allow me to buy a new Mac. Below is a screenshot of the "About my Mac" window, if you require any more specific data just ask me (and tell me where to find it) and I shall post it.  |
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| How old is "pretty old"? Those specs, such as they are, are the same as for my Mac mini, and it ran Mavericks, Yosemite, and now El Capitan for the most part without issue. It looks like you have the "late 2012"; 10.9/10.10/10.11 apparently only require the "early 2009", so you should be in range. I did have some problems when first upgrading to Yosemite where the OS failed to load properly and whole thing got corrupted. I did a clean reinstall and the problems went away. My guess is that this was related to previously having done multiple in-place upgrades rather than a clean install (combined with having previously imported its identity from a previous Mac, that meant the machine had a several-version "upgrade" history and quite a lot of redundant crap clogging it up from like Snow Leopard and so on). Any other issues with Yosemite/El Capitan have been minor UI glitches that are known bugs in the OS and will hopefully be fixed sometime soon. The main comparison I've picked up is that El Capitan is noticeably faster than Yosemite; I don't know if Yosemite was actually slower than predecessors or if I was just doing more with it. |
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| El Capitan? I guess I missed the announcement about that one. I looked that one up, and I see that's going to be in autumn this year. Clean Install, eh? I guess I'll have to backup some documents, pictures and other stuff first then (at least my BMax projects are saved on a separate device). I bought this thing in 2013 or so, but I strongly believe it was already an outdated thing when I bought it (as I believe company who sold it to me was swindling me, though I cannot fully prove it), so I cannot really tell its true age. Question is also if the update to El Capitan will be free as well or if I need to pay then. Well the Mac Store is not that far away from me (no not the swindler company I mentioned earlier. A real Apple certified store) so maybe they can enlighten me on that one. |
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| El Capitan is free, but currently available only if you're in the developer program. I think you can register for that for free too. NB that it is a beta, and not officially recommended for general use as such yet. (I live dangerously.) I got my one around Sep-Oct 2013 as well, from a real Apple store; I think that was just the tail end of that model's availability lifecycle. Mac minis stay on the market for a comparatively long time, since they're not intended as "performance" machines in the first place. Wouldn't worry about its age too much if it is that same model. |
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| Your Mac mini screenshot looks like mine with a late 2008 IMac. For that machine the upgrade to Yosemite is not recommended as they say you need at least 6 GB of ram to have it run decently. So I don't upgrade. |
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| Your Mac mini screenshot looks like mine with a late 2008 IMac. It can't be -- The first generation i5 processors wasn't released until the end of 2009, and the i5's are a lot faster than the older Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad's at the same MHz ratings |
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| You are correct, The cpu is different. |
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| A guy working for an Apple store thinks I'll be fine with Yosemite and especially with El Capitan (Once it's released), and he speaks in his own disadvantage (after all, recommending against it would basically force me to buy a new machine). I shall look up the RAM requirements though. EDIT: I just found out I could look up the hardware build in OS X (never knew I could), and I can confirm now I'm on a Late 2012 machine. |
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