Mavericks or Yosemite

What do you mean by "fastest experience"? Later versions of OS X have better memory management and better GPU drivers, so they can be marginally faster in some workflows. Also, Yosemite includes latest version of the LLVM compiler, programs built with it will be faster in many cases. At any rate, your question is too vague to be answered clearly. If its a production machine for a dedicated task (say, video editing) without open internet access and it runs fine, I suggest you stay with whatever OS X you currently have. If its a general-purpose computer, then I would recommend latest OS X version (you might want to wait for 10.10.2 release though, it seems to fix some unpleasant bugs some people are experiencing).

if your updating from snow leopard , copy your iPhoto library to an external drive for safe keeping in case anything goes wrong. . you will need apple's tool to convert it to the new library format, this utility does not come with your standard Yosemite install.


http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1523

it was a mess over here going from snow leopard to mavericks and almost every picture got duplicated on my iPhone.

run a time machine backup in case you dont have one

it will ask you to download that utility when you run iPhoto after upgrading..

if you run yosemite on a new computer, and restore from a time capsule created from a snow leopard machine, it will ignore all your pictures and not even bother to import them into the new iPhoto

For the fastest experience, stay on SL, imo. The later versions are all more and more bloated, social media, auto saving, useless eye candy stuff.

Plus SL has separate expose and spaces, which for me is crucial to my workflow.

i prefer yosemite to mavericks, i have no hard facts or data to backup any claims. I only have 4gb ram and have never had it crash or slow down. I am a careful user and am pleased with the performance i get.

In your shoes, I would upgrade to Yosemite. (It adds certain eye candy as another user said, but also subtracts some.)

More importantly, some broad performance improvements were introduced in Mavericks and Yosemite retains them and adds more minor ones. (A brief and non-exhaustive overview: https://www.apple.com/osx/advanced-technologies/) Mavericks ran well on my Mac mini (with inferior specs to yours) except in the most arduous of situations, like complex effects renders from Motion.

Stay with the OS you got unless you want the social features of a later OS. Mavericks and Yositime introduce annoying bugs that may affect you. Yositime seems to be the most bug infested OS released from Apple yet. Most but not all the bugs have been sorted out with Mavericks.

Now if you feel ambitious, you can keep your existing OS, and create Boot drives containing Mavericks and Yositime and you can do some comparison valid for your work flow.

IMHO you will not notice performance difference between OSs for everyday stuff, but there will be some features added by later OSs, like iMessage integration. I keep a 10.6.8 OS running on one of my machines because its stable and I know all my apps work with it. It is just as quick as my 10.9.8... putting the boot OS on a SSD makes a heck of more day to day difference than the various OS versions.

How can I update my 2011 Mac Mini to Mavericks? I'm on 10.8.5 and really do not want to upgrade to Yosemite.

Thank you.

OP wrote above:
[[ I have the quad core Mac mini i7 2.3mhz 16gig ram on snow leopard ]]

Do you mean a "late-2012" i7 2.3ghz Mini?
That model CANNOT RUN "Snow Leopard".
It originally came from the factory with OS 10.8.2 "Mountain Lion" (and it was a special version of ML that was required at the time of release).

Insofar as going to Mavericks or Yosemite is concerned:

Very VERY important is what kind of drive you have installed.
You will find either 10.9 or 10.10 to seem relatively "slower" than 10.8 -- IF you have a platter-based hard disk drive.
This will probably not be an issue -- IF you are using an SSD (solid state drive) to boot and run the Mini.

I still use 10.8.5 as "the main OS" on my own late-2012 Mini (which I boot and run from an SSD mounted in a USB3/SATA docking station).
I've experimented with Mavericks -- found it to be terrible speed-wise.
Since then, I'm experimenting with Yosemite installed on an old firewire400 external drive, and it's quite usable. You have to get used to "the different look", which some folks find unattractive.

Also important:
If you decide to try an upgrade, you better consider creating a CLONED BACKUP of your current system.
It's really the only way you can easily "go back to where you were" if you find your experience with the new OS less than satisfying...

Unless you need a specific feature that's missing in SL, I would stick with SL. 3 Mac's here, 2 on Yosemite and 1 on SL. The SL box simply works. As it always has. Its quick, no lags when opening or using some Apple apps. 100% stability. I/O actually works. No failures to mount (USB), drives actually sleep (FireWire). Quick boot and shutdown times.

Versus Mavericks, I'd choose Yosemite in a heartbeat. Neither my wife nor I we're fond of Mavericks. We both did fresh installs of Yosemite and never looked back.

dmcwally said:

I have the quad core Mac mini i7 2.3mhz 16gig ram on snow leopard. I can download Mavericks or Yosemite. Should I keep it on snow leopard or upgrade to one of the others ?

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I don't care about upgrade features. Just want the fastest experience possible

Click to expand...

Mavericks has compressed memory and is stable. Yosemite has compressed memory but massive memory leaks to compress. Avoid until next summer would be my recommendation so stick with Mavericks.

I'm running a Late '12 i7 2.3gHz 1TB HDD (have a 240GB SSD to install yet) and 16GB of RAM on Mavericks!

All seems well...I almost prefer Mavericks to Yosemite which I am running on my rMBP.

Not sure if it is worth getting Yosemite once I upgrade to the SSD or not.

Opinions??

dmcwally said:

I have the quad core Mac mini i7 2.3mhz 16gig ram on snow leopard. I can download Mavericks or Yosemite. Should I keep it on snow leopard or upgrade to one of the others ?

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I don't care about upgrade features. Just want the fastest experience possible

Click to expand...

Mavericks and Yosemite (and Mountain Lion as well) are all, more or less, as fast as each other on the same hardware. While Yosemite is uglier and certainly a bit more irritating from a technician's point of view, I do believe it is smoother and less annoying in a lot of small ways (that add up) than Mavericks. You also get the benefit of it being newer (and not having to do a major leap forward).

That being said, you may not be able to get Mavericks at this point if you didn't already "purchase" it.

Otherwise, I'd heed the advice of other posters as to how best to migrate your data as Snow Leopard to Mavericks, let alone to Yosemite is quite a jump.