Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

roadkill401

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 11, 2015
519
210
Apple says that Catalina is compatible with my really old 2012 Mac Mini i5. Now it came standard with 4gb of ram and a 500gb 5400rpm hard drive. Will Cataline realistically work with is mac?

Going forward, I know that more ram can be added bringing it up to 8 or 16gb. Would that make any real difference? Likewise, I think you can probably replace the harddrive inside this. Not like it has any warranty that will be voided if I do. Would adding an SSD to make a Fusion drive make any difference as well?

Right now the mac is working quite well and running on El Capitan. It might not be blazingly fast but it works fine to surf the internet. I even have Logic Pro X running on it with multiple external sound banks and works fine for that. But I am told that will likely need to upgrade in order to keep connectivity with my iPad Pro 2018 when I move to iOS/PadOS 13.
 

JusVan.exe

macrumors newbie
Apr 29, 2019
29
11
The best upgrade you can do is to Make your boot drive a ssd. I have a MacBook Pro mid 2012 running Catalina as fast as my MacBook Air mid 2019.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jwolf6589

roadkill401

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 11, 2015
519
210
When I originally purchased the mac mini it has Maverick loaded onto it and t worked pretty well. I was told by the lovely people at Apple Support that to fix one issue that I had on it that I had to upgrade to Yosemite, and the performance went downhill dramatically, and the number of broken things went from one to many. I did get El Capitan to start working but I don't know how its speed is compared to Maverick as I don't have a side by side. My fear is that upgrading any further will be like the jump to Yosemite that made everything far worse.

My fear is that every subsequent OS is designed and optimized to work best with the most recent generation of processor and equipment, and as this is now effective obsolete hardware that only is hanging on as it took so long for Apple to release the next iteration that it falls inside the mandate to provide an upgrade path, not that the hardware is suited to the OS and processes that it will perform. Like, it has code inside the OS for sidecar even though this hardware cant supports it. Who knows what else.

But if others have done the move and it really does work, I guess I can try it. Is there a viable way to back out and revert back to the original OS?
 

Hazmat401

macrumors 6502
Dec 29, 2017
390
1,071
Delaware County, Pa
When I originally purchased the mac mini it has Maverick loaded onto it and t worked pretty well. I was told by the lovely people at Apple Support that to fix one issue that I had on it that I had to upgrade to Yosemite, and the performance went downhill dramatically, and the number of broken things went from one to many. I did get El Capitan to start working but I don't know how its speed is compared to Maverick as I don't have a side by side. My fear is that upgrading any further will be like the jump to Yosemite that made everything far worse.

My fear is that every subsequent OS is designed and optimized to work best with the most recent generation of processor and equipment, and as this is now effective obsolete hardware that only is hanging on as it took so long for Apple to release the next iteration that it falls inside the mandate to provide an upgrade path, not that the hardware is suited to the OS and processes that it will perform. Like, it has code inside the OS for sidecar even though this hardware cant supports it. Who knows what else.

But if others have done the move and it really does work, I guess I can try it. Is there a viable way to back out and revert back to the original OS?

You would be much better off with a 1 TB SSD.... the fastest you can get for whatever budget you have along with the 16GB

What you should really do... is get you an ifixit tool kit and disassemble it to clean out the dust and apply new thermal paste

You could get a full 10-12 years out of it
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.