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2012 MBA - should I install Sierra?
- Thread starter OceanFrog
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I have Sierra on my 2012 Macbook Air.
This may be isolated incident, but I'll share my experience that did not exist in El Capitan.
- Battery. Yes, my 2012 laptop's battery is not really in tip-top shape, but under Sierra, my Macbook Air now shuts down by itself when the battery indicator is still showing ~30-40% battery left. When connected to the charger, it says 0%. Tried SMC resets dozens of times, and even clean installing Sierra, and it's still happening. I didn't have this issue at all when it was still on El Capitan.
- Performance wise, it's okay. However GUI related things like expose etc feels a bit less smooth. It's as if Sierra push the GPU a bit more.
- For some reason, Safari sometimes have troubles connecting to Google services, be it search or youtube. Using Bing etc didn't produce the same problem. Safari sometimes just lost internet connectivity for no reason (it is waiting to load a page, but no internet activity, then it times out. Subsequent refresh works fine. Weird).
So those are my experience. My biggest issue is the battery, as I frequently in the middle of typing and suddenly the laptop shuts down. It's highly annoying.
This may be isolated incident, but I'll share my experience that did not exist in El Capitan.
- Battery. Yes, my 2012 laptop's battery is not really in tip-top shape, but under Sierra, my Macbook Air now shuts down by itself when the battery indicator is still showing ~30-40% battery left. When connected to the charger, it says 0%. Tried SMC resets dozens of times, and even clean installing Sierra, and it's still happening. I didn't have this issue at all when it was still on El Capitan.
- Performance wise, it's okay. However GUI related things like expose etc feels a bit less smooth. It's as if Sierra push the GPU a bit more.
- For some reason, Safari sometimes have troubles connecting to Google services, be it search or youtube. Using Bing etc didn't produce the same problem. Safari sometimes just lost internet connectivity for no reason (it is waiting to load a page, but no internet activity, then it times out. Subsequent refresh works fine. Weird).
So those are my experience. My biggest issue is the battery, as I frequently in the middle of typing and suddenly the laptop shuts down. It's highly annoying.
Sierra on my 2012 Air since day one. No problems. Was afraid that iPhoto would not work with Sierra but just works fine. Most of the time my Air is used in clamshell mode attached to a 23" monitor as my main computer. Siri is a joke though.
I have replaced my battery, it was easy to do.
i hope my air lasts a long time as the new replacement is just too expensive. I think I will be forced back to Windows when this computer fails. Apple is changing and not for the better.
I have replaced my battery, it was easy to do.
i hope my air lasts a long time as the new replacement is just too expensive. I think I will be forced back to Windows when this computer fails. Apple is changing and not for the better.
If the laptop is your primary laptop, or you use it most of the time, I say stick with El Capitan for now. It's one of the best version of MacOS I've ever used, especially after the dreaded Yosemite.Thanks for the replies guys. Looks like I'll play it safe and keep El Cap ... not worth the risk of slowing down my MBS for Sierra.
This is me btw ... I have 8gb RAM but still not sure if this will make a difference.
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Really? Yosemite ran like a champ on my MacBook Air. I didn't upgrade to El Capitan, but did to Sierra and it's a lot slower and more sluggish on the Air.
El Cap was solid. People like/liked El Cap because it basically fixed all the bugs in Yosemite (and there were a bunch when it launched) and for some people Yosemite had slow animations (so it made the computer/OS feel laggy, like it was an older iPhone running a newer iOS version, switching between desktops for example stuttered needlessly), El Cap basically fixed those issues so it felt a lot faster, and was noticeable for older devices (felt like an "upgrade" especially if you were running an intel core duo laptop coming from yosimete to el cap)
OP you can always Time machine backup and try upgrading, then downgrade/restore to El Cap if you don't like Sierra. Sierra seems to run fine on my iMac but its a more powerful machine than the Air so I can't say how it would affect your computer.
Yosemite is very buggy. Even the mail app can crash on its own for no reason. This alone makes it quite unusable for me. I really dreaded the days I had with Yosemite. When El capitan came out, it was a complete relief.
Sierra, although stable, doesn't feel as smooth as El Capitan (plus the battery shutdowns I'm having on my 2012 MacBook Air ever since I updated to Sierra). Considering el capitan is still being supported, for highly mission critical devices, I would probably hold off in updating to Sierra. Seriously, I don't need to be talking to Siri when I can find what I want quicker with spotlight. I mean it's like Cortana on Windows 10. Great for demo, but how many people actually uses it.
hi Yeah you should; its from Mac and its a download that cant possibly go wrong; Ive heard of songs skipping when they were placed in an external drive due to a weirdo problem like the drive getting flipped over; that actually happens; and your download from Mac is completely unlike that .
I never encountered a single problem with Yosemite on my Macbook Air. It ran very smooth, fast and was stable. I'm sick of the stutters and beachballs with Sierra and am seriously contemplating going back to Yosemite.
2012 Air, 8gb ram. I'm running Sierra - no known issues so far, operation is smooth. El Capitan also ran fine, but I had one constant annoyance with it; there was a somewhat longish delay before I could enter my password after awaking from sleep. This delay is much less running Sierra, back to normal I'd say.