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How is MacOS Sierra running on the older Macs?

A

andreyush

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 24, 2015
583
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Hello!

I am wondering how MacOS runs on the older machines? Many people say that Macs can work decent between 3 and 5 years, after that upgrading the OS can be a little difficult.

How is your Macbook/Imac/MacMini running with MacOS ? And what heavy tasks do you perform on them? :D
 
I believe the critical factor on how well it runs is whether or not the Mac in question has a platter-based hard drive, or an SSD or fusion drive instead.

With an HDD, Sierra may run, but from the viewpoint of the user the experience may seem more like it's "walking" instead of "running".

With either an SSD or fusion drive, the user experience will certainly be much more pleasing...
 
Working good with my min 2012 rMBP 15. The battery life is meh and percentage miscalculations are annoying but overall so far so good.
 
Fishrrman said:
I believe the critical factor on how well it runs is whether or not the Mac in question has a platter-based hard drive, or an SSD or fusion drive instead.

With an HDD, Sierra may run, but from the viewpoint of the user the experience may seem more like it's "walking" instead of "running".

With either an SSD or fusion drive, the user experience will certainly be much more pleasing...
Click to expand...

I agree. I have a the top end mid 2011 27" iMac. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB but it still has the hard drive. Sierra runs decently. It takes a while to boot and apps take a while to load. But once loaded I don't notice any noticeable lag. I also have a 2011 MacBook Air with an SSD. The MacBook boots and loads apps more quickly. I'm sure a SSD would make a world of difference in the iMac because it would fix the things that are noticeably slow. Also Sierra isn't noticeably slower then the more recent previous versions of macOS.
 
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I've got a Macbook Pro 13" early 2011 with 8GB of RAM. I was running El Capitan smoothly on my Crucial M4 128 GB SSD. Last week I bought a larger SSD (Crucial MX300 525GB) and decided to do a fresh install. I went with sierra after 12.2 was released and transfer my old user account and settings to the new drive.
After letting it run for a couple of days (spotlight indexing and photo's-id) I can say I don't notice any difference in performance compared to El Cap. Only booting seems to take a bit longer. I've done a Geekbench 4 before and after and my machine is faster but that might also be because of the faster SSD. Since my macbook doesn't have bluetooth 4 the only real new features I use is the storage manager (although I've got plenty of space on my new drive) and the option sort folders on top of files in Finder. I disabled Siri from the beginning.
It fixed the one and only issue I had with El Cap; when my external hard drive was connected through my 24" Cinema Display, it ejected the drives as soon the macbook woke from standby. I've had this from the beginning since I installed el cap last year.

Bottom line: if you have a SSD and 8gb of ram you'll probably be fine but on the machines with bluetooth 4.0 there aren't any real new features. Oh and I lost my battery time remaining indicator..

It's nice though that my macbook supports Sierra so'll I'll probably keep using this machine for 2-3 years!
 
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I'm running it on a 2009 iMac that's not even officially supported to run it, and it runs beautifully. I've upgraded this computer to an SSD so I'm sure that has a lot to do with it.
 
neliason said:
I agree. I have a the top end mid 2011 27" iMac. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB but it still has the hard drive. Sierra runs decently. It takes a while to boot and apps take a while to load. But once loaded I don't notice any noticeable lag. I also have a 2011 MacBook Air with an SSD. The MacBook boots and loads apps more quickly. I'm sure a SSD would make a world of difference in the iMac because it would fix the things that are noticeably slow. Also Sierra isn't noticeably slower then the more recent previous versions of macOS.
Click to expand...

I have a mid-2010 27" iMac, but I retro-fitted an SSD to make a fusion drive (and put in more RAM and a bigger HDD). Sierra runs just fine - I don't notice any lag at all anywhere - so that goes to confirm your hypothesis that the SSD is the trick.
 
neliason said:
I agree. I have a the top end mid 2011 27" iMac. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB but it still has the hard drive. Sierra runs decently. It takes a while to boot and apps take a while to load. But once loaded I don't notice any noticeable lag. I also have a 2011 MacBook Air with an SSD. The MacBook boots and loads apps more quickly. I'm sure a SSD would make a world of difference in the iMac because it would fix the things that are noticeably slow. Also Sierra isn't noticeably slower then the more recent previous versions of macOS.
Click to expand...

I have the same experience. Mac takes a while to boot and load apps for the first time, but once loaded it runs swell. Thats why I have not upgraded my MacBook pro 2012 to a SSD hard drive.
 
2009 iMac 27: Runs perfectly with 16GB RAM and a Samsung Evo 500GB SSD
2010 Mac Mini: 8GB RAM, Stock HDD. Runs horribly, I am going to try a SSD or roll back. Totally unusable.
 
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Mid-2012 13" 1TB HDD. Runs fine.

The only complaint I have is when autocorrect/autocomplete decides to take a few seconds to do something. Might be another issue, though; it's been slow to boot lately. I'll be poking around some more to figure out what's up. I might turn off autocomplete, too, as I get impatient when I'm typing.
 
BarracksSi said:
Mid-2012 13" 1TB HDD. Runs fine.

The only complaint I have is when autocorrect/autocomplete decides to take a few seconds to do something. Might be another issue, though; it's been slow to boot lately. I'll be poking around some more to figure out what's up. I might turn off autocomplete, too, as I get impatient when I'm typing.
Click to expand...


You might want to try increasing the RAM. Sounds like it's being slowed down swapping data in and out.
 
RAM pressure has been fine, according to Activity Monitor; but yeah, if it's swapping a lot, I can see how it'll slow down for stuff like this. If I can swap its 8GB for some more space, I'll be able to push purchasing a new laptop even further into the future. (plus it's got the optical bay I can swap for an additional drive.. yay)
 
Runs good on my 2012 27" iMac (1 TB HDD, 8GB RAM). Booting is slower, but that was already slower with El Capitan and Yosemite.

Heavy programs like Lightroom also take a long time to start. But this is also due to the fact that these programs have become larger. After startup, Lightroom runs well (speed is the same as with previous OS-X versions).
 
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Update: Turned out that my HD was dying (which Disk Utility had reported a couple months ago, but it said it was fine early this week), so I got it replaced along with the flex cable.

Much better now. Good enough that I'm not planning on buying a new one for a while longer.
 
I think my rMB 2015 runs better on el cap 10.11.6 than Sierra,

even with 8/256, its still using a mobile proc,
 
my late 2013 27" imac definetly runs worst with macos sierra. with only minimal number of programs installed, youtube hd playing is choppy/stuttering, scrolling in safari is stuttery, even the screen saver, i'm using flurry, is stuttering sometimes, isn't as buttery smooth like on el cap.
 
Just installed Sierra on my early 2011 MBP 15", but on a brand new SSD, along with 16GB RAM, and a new battery... I'm still tweaking the battery, but it's like I have a brand new machine! I'm hoping to squeeze another 1-2 years out of it.
 
Had it running on an early 2011 13" MPB with a 256GB SSD, 2.7GHz i7 and 8GB of ram. Ran smoothly there, made the fans run at times when El Capitan didn't. Now I have it running on an early 2013 15" MBP with a 750GB SSD, 2.8GHz i7, and 16GB of ram and it runs very smoothly as it did on the other machine, I just don't hear the fans unless I run FCPXq
 
I have an MBP Early 2011 15'' and facing the problem with the blurred screen when I reduce / change the resolution size from standard to a lower one. I don't have this problem, when I have the standard scaled resolution. I tried everything from PRAM to SMC Reset, restarting, quitting all apps. Nothing worked. Also I never used Photos before, but i started and quit it by myself. Still the blurred screen / fonts are there since I updated from El Capitan to Sierra (10.12.2). In El Capitan and also before I never had this kind of problem. It is very frustrating and I cannot use my setup like before. Aynonelse facing these issues or has other suggestions?

Also in the Apple forum 2011 MPB owner are reporting this problem. (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7725238?start=0&tstart=0)
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coghlan said:
See the thread about how Sierra causes MBP screens to become blurred at lower resolutions.
Click to expand...
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/sierra-makes-my-2011-mbp-screens-blurred.2019636/
 
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