10.8 vs 10.7 on older hardware?

[CommodityFetish]

Has anyone had luck running 10.8 on older hardware? How does it compare with 10.7?

I have an older MBP, early 2008 model, which is just over the cutoff for 10.8 support (since it runs "late 2007 or later" for MPBs). It has 4GB ram.

I'm wondering if I'd be better off sticking with 10.7, performance wise, memory wise, etc. Would be curious to hear other's experiences with 10.8 on similar machines.

 

[limo79]

MBP 4.1 Early 2008 in stock config with 2GB RAM and HDD. It seems more responsive than Lion, but all animations and scrolling are laggy. Memory management seems to be improved. Safari 6 - huge improvement over Safari 6 under Lion - no comparison at all.

Battery time is quite promising - I saw 2:33 result which is really good result on my old battery.

Unfortunately temperatures (AC power) are too high in my opinion. OS X 10.8 temps (battery)=OS X 10.5.8 temps (AC power) which is not good. I hope that Apple will fix this problem.

 

[CommodityFetish]

Thanks! Sounds like a mixed bag, with probably more positive than negative:

+
better responsiveness overall
better memory management
better Safari
maybe better battery life

-
laggy animations and scrolling
higher running temperature


I don't use Safari. (Firefox FTW!) My main gripe with Lion is how maddeningly long it can take to show what files are in a directory in the Finder and open/save dialogs. Also not crazy about iCloud and it seems that it's so baked into 10.8 that there's no way to opt-out of apple storing all your data.