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iMac 5k 2015 (17,1) runs fine on 10.11 thinking of upgrading to 10.12 or 10.13

honeycombz

honeycombz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 6, 2013
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Hey, my iMac 5k 2015 (17,1) runs fine on El Capitan but with Mojave on the horizon I am thinking of upgrading to Sierra or High Sierra. Wondering if anyone has any advice? I have a 2012 Macbook Pro at home running Sierra fine but that one runs off an SSD and the iMac is the spinner plus ssd fusion drive thing which has me hesitant about High Sierra. I have an ancient 2009 iMac that I hack upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra and noticed considerable performance improvements in High Sierra than Sierra but that is an old machine so probably not the best benchmark. Anyhow, happy with El Capitan but don't like to stagnate on one OS for too long. Thoughts?
 
I see no perf difference between El Capitan and high Sierra on my 5K 2015 1Tb Fusion drive ...
 
nambuccaheadsau said:
Wait until Mojave is released in the next two months. Reports say it will overcome the problem High Sierra has had converting Fusions to APFS.
Click to expand...
High Sierra has no problem to convert HFS+ to APFS since it doesn't support APFS on Fusion drive.
It's not a problem, it works perfectly in HFS+
 
High Sierra - yes. Mojave - probably not. The problem is two-fold:

1) Apple has decided to convert all boot drives starting with 10.14 regardless of type (SSD/FD/HDD).
2) Apple has removed the switch to prevent the installer from converting the boot drive to APFS.

In other words: as of today there is no user-friendly way to install 10.14 Mojave on HFS+ and avoid APFS. That said I would also still suggest waiting for 10.14 because it is supposed to run much better on hard drives and Fusion Drives. Which, coincidentally, has absolutely nothing to do with APFS and everything with internal optimizations.
 
Ok, with all this said, perhaps I will just bump my machines to 10.12 from 10.11 since my macbook is already running Sierra fine and then hold off until after a few Mojave patches. It's not like I can't make the move to High Sierra at some point if I decide to.
 
If you upgrade to High Sierra, the fusion drive will keep HFS+.
As far as I'm concerned, that's a GOOD thing.
I don't consider APFS to be "ready for prime time" yet.

Recommendation:
BEFORE you upgrade at all, do this:
- get an external drive (USB is fine)
- download either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper (both free to use for 30 days)
- create a BOOTABLE cloned backup of your current El Capitan drive
- set this aside for safekeeping.

WHY?
If anything goes wrong with the upgrade, having a bootable cloned backup makes it child's play to "get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged".
Without a cloned backup, you can still get back -- but it WON'T be "easy".
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the advice. I use SuperDuper and will probably just do an incremental update to Sierra for the time being. If I am unhappy with Sierra I can always push to High Sierra or Mojave.
 
Installed Sierra today. Went smoothly. Nothing to report. Probably will wait until end of year to make another update.
 
Why not go to High Sierra? Sierra is today’s Leopard and High Sierra is today’s Snow Leopard.

*2015 iMac with Mojave*
 
"Sierra is today’s Leopard and High Sierra is today’s Snow Leopard."

No.... they're not.
 
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I probably will go to High Sierra. Just not today. Fishrrman, what do you mean that High Sierra is not today's Snow Leopard? It isn't an incremental refinement to Sierra?
 
Adding an entirely new file system is not "an incremental refinement"...
 
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I would upgrade to High Sierra now to stay on more recent and reasonably well supported OS (El Capitan only gets the most critical updates these days, but even that will likely end soon). It is quite mature now. Of course backups are always necessary.

There is no issue with fusion drive. It will work just as well as in El Capitan and won't be converted to APFS.

I would certainly recommend to avoid a first bunch of minor releases of Mojave when it is released later this year if you value stability.
 
High Sierra was supposed to be an incremental update over Sierra to iron out the worst bugs and provide users with a stable and robust platform for years to come.

We all know how that turned out :rolleyes:
 
There are two options here. Upgrade to High Sierra 10.13.6 which is very stable and retain HFS+ or upgrade to Mojave 10.14 when it is released soon with APFS.

I have found no appreciable gain having APFS instead of HFS+ and would recommend High Sierra for stability and not consider Mojave until 10.14.4
 
Hey, just revisiting this thread for an update. I’ve been happily on the latest version of Sierra on both my iMac and mid 2012 macbook pro. Gearing up for another update eondering if I should skip HS and go straight to Mojave or wait for Catalina. I’m maybe leaning towards Mojave just due to the fact I haven’t even considered what 32 bit apps I’m running but not sure. Or I could just bump up to HS but dark mode could be fun. Thoughts?
 
honeycombz said:
Hey, just revisiting this thread for an update. I’ve been happily on the latest version of Sierra on both my iMac and mid 2012 macbook pro. Gearing up for another update eondering if I should skip HS and go straight to Mojave or wait for Catalina. I’m maybe leaning towards Mojave just due to the fact I haven’t even considered what 32 bit apps I’m running but not sure. Or I could just bump up to HS but dark mode could be fun. Thoughts?
Click to expand...
Mojave runs fine on my 2013 MBA, should be similar to your machine? I hope you have inserted an SSD into it?

Given how slow and buggy the current Catalina beta is, I’d wait until the .1 update. Especially on older hardware where you would notice the slowness more.
 
Yea, think I’ll avoid Catalina fir now and skip HS for Mojave and take some time to widdle down my application base further. Over the years I have accumulated apps I never use but can’t get rid of for some reason and think I want a nice concise application base moving forward to make moving from systems and computers easier. Everyone here thinks Mojave is a better performing less buggy OS than HS?
 
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