Macbook Pro late 2013 8MB RAM struggling with High Sierra - upgrade to Mojave?

[zanchit]

So my MacBook Pro (late 2013) 8MB RAM, 2.8ghz i7 and iMac 27 inch (late 2012) 32MB RAM, 3.4ghz i7, are both still on High Sierra since I was using Photoshop CS5 and needed the 32 bit support. But I have now upgraded to CC so don't need to stay on High Sierra

Both my MacBook and iMac are struggling. My MacBook has RAM issues (I am a multi-tasker so often have many programs open including Photoshop and Lightroom). I am hoping to upgrade my MacBook in the new year but was flirting with the idea of upgrading to Mojave beforehand as I'm having to use an old version of CC because High Sierra so outdated. Added to that, my iMac suffers from the wheel of doom whenever I ask it to do anything, despite 32mb of ram, and I will probably have to wait until the new iMac comes out in 2021 to upgrade that.

Was thinking of upgrading both machines to Mojave/Catalina but from what I read in previous threads, maybe Mojave is better.

Is Mojave less RAM hungry than High Sierra? Is it worth upgrading or should I stay on High Sierra until I get a new MacBook at some point in 2021? Equally what to do with the iMac.

Any advice gratefully received.

Thanks so much

 

[MacCraig Pro]

Are they both running with HDD's or SSD's?

 

[ght56]

I think Mojave is a more stable OS than both High Sierra, Catalina, and Big Sur. However, given your usage case scenario, if lack of RAM is causing you a slowdown on the laptop, I don't see an OS change making a very big difference there as I am guessing the apps you are using are the ones demanding RAM much more than the OS.

With the desktop, provided you have a SSD and not a HDD, that should still be a very usable system. Is that one using a SSD, HDD, or Fusion Drive?

 

[zanchit]

Are they both running with HDD's or SSD's?

MacBook pro is SSD. IMac is fusion

 

[zanchit]

I think Mojave is a more stable OS than both High Sierra, Catalina, and Big Sur. However, given your usage case scenario, if lack of RAM is causing you a slowdown on the laptop, I don't see an OS change making a very big difference there as I am guessing the apps you are using are the ones demanding RAM much more than the OS.

With the desktop, provided you have a SSD and not a HDD, that should still be a very usable system. Is that one using a SSD, HDD, or Fusion Drive?

The iMac is 3.1tb fusion.

I think I’m not expecting much improvement if upgrade MacBook but I feel some of the programs I use need to be updated but can’t be because I’m running high Sierra, so could be beneficial to upgrade MacBook.

am baffled why iMac is struggling. It’s a beast and has 32mg ram. And I have 1tb of space left. Wondering whether because am running old incompatible apps like cs5. Or whether need to buy more third party RAM. The wheel of doom spins for a little while with almost everything I ask it to do....

 

[ght56]

The iMac is 3.1tb fusion.

I think I’m not expecting much improvement if upgrade MacBook but I feel some of the programs I use need to be updated but can’t be because I’m running high Sierra, so could be beneficial to upgrade MacBook.

am baffled why iMac is struggling. It’s a beast and has 32mg ram. And I have 1tb of space left. Wondering whether because am running old incompatible apps like cs5. Or whether need to buy more third party RAM. The wheel of doom spins for a little while with almost everything I ask it to do....

32GB of RAM should be sufficient for most tasks, but you can check the activity monitor to see if your RAM pressure is high. As a rule of thumb, green is good, yellow is iffy, and red means you need more RAM. You can also use the Activity Monitor to see if your CPU is a bottleneck. Again, my inclination there would be that it is not. I don't think either are culprit.

One other possibility is that the hard drive portion of the Fusion drive is beginning to fail. It is nearly a 10 year old system and spinning hard drives only last so long. There are some programs that can attempt to detect physical failure, if you are interested. In this case, a drive replacement is necessary. Further, upgrading to a pure SSD would certainly yield a performance improvement. This is something you can do yourself or an installer can do. SSDs are pretty cheap now.

Another possibility is something is wrong with the OS. This would be fixed most easily by an OS reinstall. If your current High Sierra install is using the HFS+ filesystem, I would be sure of the implications of moving to APFS with a Fusion Drive, which I believe Mojave and Catalina force you to use in all situations and APFS performance on HDDs is not very good. All that said, I am not super knowledgable on Fusion Drives.

Beyond everything else, given you are experiencing issues that can suggest a possible hardware issue, be very vigilant with those back ups!

 

[brianmowrey]

am baffled why iMac is struggling. It’s a beast and has 32mg ram. And I have 1tb of space left. Wondering whether because am running old incompatible apps like cs5. Or whether need to buy more third party RAM. The wheel of doom spins for a little while with almost everything I ask it to do....

Either OS reinstall as mentioned above or buy an external ssd and boot to that going forward should bring the imac back to fighting form.

For the MBP, you’re stuck with working under 8, ie less multitasking