Disclaimer: the title of this post will make absolutely no sense to anyone who doesn’t own a Mac computer, and unless you’re into computing technology this post may likely put you to sleep.
It was my Day of Reckoning: I upgraded my main machine from OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) directly to OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan) today, skipping right over 10.7 (Lion), 10.8 (Mountain Lion), 10.9 (Mavericks), and 10.10 (Yosemite).
That’s a leap of five versions for those keeping score. Anyone who upgrades their operating system by five versions without flinching has nerves of steel. That wouldn’t be me — I definitely flinched. In fact, I’ve been postponing this upgrade for almost two years now, since Yosemite was released in 2014 for free. That was a pretty good incentive to upgrade, but apparently not enough of an incentive for me to risk losing software due to possible compatibility issues. So I waited. Like Elvis sang, only fools rush in…
Then El Capitan was released in 2015, also free (thanks Apple), and I waited for the usual bugs to get reported and fixed. I kept postponing the upgrade, because it never seems to be a good time to upgrade. I didn’t want to interrupt a big editing job, or I had to get a presentation done, or I was migrating my websites, or this or that. But I don’t really have the excuse that I would lose all productivity — I still have my 2004 PowerBook G4 which functions just fine. But it’s really slow (photo editing is impossible on it) and it’s run out of browsers that still work on Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) except Safari, which spits out messages from practically all websites reminding me that my software is grossly out of date. I mainly use the 12-year old PowerBook for writing articles and email these days in the kitchen, which is the coolest room in the apartment.
It’s not like I wasn’t looking forward to an upgrade, either. For one thing, I knew it would probably make my mail program run faster. At present there are about 30,000 emails in the database, and it’s getting quite bogged down. My browsers are all complaining because as of this year they are too old to be supported. There are always new features to improve the way things work, security updates, usually an increase in overall speed and efficiency, and new applications are written for newer technology. Postponing has its limits.
But why not upgrade sooner?
I use a late 2009 model iMac with 12GBs of RAM. I dragged this thing across the Atlantic from Toronto in its own suitcase and it’s now almost seven years old. I run a lot of software to process photos (including Nikon Capture NX2, Photo Mechanic, Lightroom 4, Adobe CS3/mostly Photoshop 10). In the past I’ve had problems with upgrades rendering software buggy or useless, and this is not specific to any operating system — it’s happened to me on Windows and Mac. I live in a Windows/Mac/Linux household, and the word upgrade evokes the same reaction for each operating system: back up everything and cross your fingers.
What’s this post got to do with sunflowers?
Sunflowers (girassóis in Portuguese) are the happiest flowers around. You have to think happy thoughts while you undertake this process.
After reading other reports of success by users who upgraded by several versions, I decided to bite the bullet and do it. I back up using Time Machine, but I’ve never tried to restore anything from it. Cross fingers. I did the usual maintenance like run Disk Utility first. It took ages to download OS X 10.11 from iTunes (I read that it’s more than 6GBs), but the update itself was surprisingly fast. I don’t know exactly how long it took because I went out with Ice the Dog for his usual one-hour afternoon walk, and when we returned home the update was finished.
I had to download a stack of updates from the App Store and tweak a bunch of new settings on the new operating system, but so far I’ve had no major problems. The one thing that took a long time — as in hours — was updating Apple Mail. It must use a different library system because it cycled through a series of actions including migration, and meanwhile I dealt with email using my phone.
Since I’m writing this mainly for the benefit of anyone who’s trying to do the same thing and searching for information about possible issues, the two applications that have crashed a few times thus far have been Apple Mail 9.3 (although it’s not crashing anymore, it was only in the first few hours of use) and Capture NX 2.3.0. Overall it’s running a little faster, but what I’ve noticed the most is that the typical sluggishness that happens when Time Machine is doing its backup has lessened considerably. It’s something that bugged me because I have no control over Time Machine’s backup schedule, which is hourly for 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and weekly backups for previous months. The backup runs often and before it would take a major hit to the computer’s speed, but now I barely notice when it’s running.
It’s not been 24 hours yet, but so far so good. I’m still getting used to the new interface and new features, but the improvements have refreshed the look and feel of this nearly seven-year old machine… and all for the price of zero. Not bad!
July 30, 2016
Album: Central Portugal