Should I "upgrade" to Catalina from Mojave on my Mid 2012 MBP?

[mikebjammin]

Title. I upgraded to Catalina a couple of months back and I found that it ran with high CPU, higher temperatures, and a decrease in performance. Part of me wants to upgrade to the most up to date version of OS just so I have it, however, I'm not having any problems with Mojave currently. Has Catalina been running "better"/less buggy since it's early releases?

Thoughts? I appreciate any replies.

 

[chscag]

Catalina runs fine for me and many other folks. It's now up to X6 and likely is the last update to it until "Big Sur" is released to the public.

If you're happy with Mojave and it's running well for you, I don't see an advantage of upgrading to Catalina.

 

[Jack Neill]

.15 runs fine on mine. Need a SSD for it to not suck. .15 is the last version for that machine.

 

[mikebjammin]

I decided to give Catalina another shot; I have a backup and Mojave on a thumb drive. Main thing holding me back from Catalina software wise was MS Office 2011, however, I was able to get an updated version from my work.

How long does it take for the "indexing" to finish on average? I have around 390ish gigs of data on my 1 TB SSD.

I think I will give it a week and see how I feel about it.

 

[mikebjammin]

Update: So the CPU usage is back to normal (i.e., like 90-95% idle for basic web browsing) but my fans are running at max while the temperature is normal (i.e., like 140-150 when doing basic web browsing). Is this still likely apart of the indexing? I have a fan control but personally I don't want to really change the settings around. I'll probably still give it a week and see.

I appreciate any replies!

 

[Taz Mangus]

Maybe try doing a SMC reset and see if that helps with the fan speed.

Reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support

The SMC is responsible for managing power on your Mac. Resetting it can resolve certain uncommon issues related to power or thermal management.

support.apple.com

 

[mikebjammin]

Maybe try doing a SMC reset and see if that helps with the fan speed.

Reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support

The SMC is responsible for managing power on your Mac. Resetting it can resolve certain uncommon issues related to power or thermal management.

support.apple.com

Thank you for your reply!

I did see people mentioning that; I assume for my Mid 2012 I would need to remove the battery? I also did a clean install of Mojave about a month ago so I would assume that those settings are hopefully okay?

I messed around with my MBP discounted from the external monitor for about 30 minutes while doing basic web tasks. It seems like the fans stayed around 2000-2500 the whole time. I saw a similar post on Reddit where the user experience increased fan speeds due to the external monitor using the GPU 100% of the time so maybe that is what is going on with me? Again i'm going to give Catalina a full week before I consider converting back. I was noticing increased fan speeds with Mojave and the external monitor as well.

 

[M3Stang]

Thank you for your reply!

I did see people mentioning that; I assume for my Mid 2012 I would need to remove the battery? I also did a clean install of Mojave about a month ago so I would assume that those settings are hopefully okay?

I messed around with my MBP discounted from the external monitor for about 30 minutes while doing basic web tasks. It seems like the fans stayed around 2000-2500 the whole time. I saw a similar post on Reddit where the user experience increased fan speeds due to the external monitor using the GPU 100% of the time so maybe that is what is going on with me? Again i'm going to give Catalina a full week before I consider converting back. I was noticing increased fan speeds with Mojave and the external monitor as well.

You won't need to remove your battery. Take a look at the section that says "without T2 chip, with non-remomvable battery" or something to that affect.

 

[mikzn]

I have been running Catalina (now at 10.15.6 build 19G73) since the 2cnd beta on a Mid 2012 i7 MBP with 512g SSD and 16g memory - it runs well and no temperature issues and in fact hard to tell any performance difference between it and my newer 2015 rMBP

Perhaps like you mention it is indexing the files for spotlight or perhaps you still have the original HDD? - definitely worth the upgrade to an SSD if you have not already done it - huge difference in speed