At the moment, I’m in the fortunate position of having not one but two 2008 MacBook Pros, both A1260 2.4GHz models, both with SSDs and one with a matte display and the other glossy. It’s a long story how I went looking for one and ended up with two but for another time.
Anyway, at the time I installed 10.15 on both via the amazing patcher by @dosdude1. There are/were a few glitches but overall, a success.
Recently, I’ve been thinking of passing one of these machines on but before I do, I thought it would be interesting to compare a Mojave installation with the Catalina, given that the hardware is identical. So that’s what I did.
First observation was that the Mojave installation was easier and more or less just worked. I chose the older format for the partition as opposed to APFS as I wanted a cleaner boot experience.
Second observation was that the boot-to-login time was definitely quicker. Just to be sure I had a drag race and the Mojave installation got to login screen in 51 secs while Catalina took 1 min, 12 secs.
Third observation was that the Mojave MBP seemed quicker when surfing the net. Using Speedtest.net I checked and was surprised to see the Mojave MBP achieving the full 73 Mbps download speed while the Catalina MBP only managed 22 Mbps. I checked several times just to be sure.
Both installations have trouble with keyboard backlighting. While the Catalina MBP has to have a little app installed to manually switch the backlight on and off, the Mojave MBP backlight is permanently on but can be controlled with the level function on the keyboard.
On balance, while it’s great to have the Catalina option if we want the very latest this hardware can support, I think I’m going to stick with Mojave. It just feels nicer and from my basic testing, works better on the A1260. If it wasn’t for the keyboard backlight, it’d be perfect.
Just to check that it’s not a hardware fault on the Catalina MBP which is slowing its networking performance down, I’m going to install Mojave on it too at the weekend and see if it makes a difference.
Anyone else with similar experiences?
Anyway, at the time I installed 10.15 on both via the amazing patcher by @dosdude1. There are/were a few glitches but overall, a success.
Recently, I’ve been thinking of passing one of these machines on but before I do, I thought it would be interesting to compare a Mojave installation with the Catalina, given that the hardware is identical. So that’s what I did.
First observation was that the Mojave installation was easier and more or less just worked. I chose the older format for the partition as opposed to APFS as I wanted a cleaner boot experience.
Second observation was that the boot-to-login time was definitely quicker. Just to be sure I had a drag race and the Mojave installation got to login screen in 51 secs while Catalina took 1 min, 12 secs.
Third observation was that the Mojave MBP seemed quicker when surfing the net. Using Speedtest.net I checked and was surprised to see the Mojave MBP achieving the full 73 Mbps download speed while the Catalina MBP only managed 22 Mbps. I checked several times just to be sure.
Both installations have trouble with keyboard backlighting. While the Catalina MBP has to have a little app installed to manually switch the backlight on and off, the Mojave MBP backlight is permanently on but can be controlled with the level function on the keyboard.
On balance, while it’s great to have the Catalina option if we want the very latest this hardware can support, I think I’m going to stick with Mojave. It just feels nicer and from my basic testing, works better on the A1260. If it wasn’t for the keyboard backlight, it’d be perfect.
Just to check that it’s not a hardware fault on the Catalina MBP which is slowing its networking performance down, I’m going to install Mojave on it too at the weekend and see if it makes a difference.
Anyone else with similar experiences?
