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Late 2009 White Unibody MacBook: High Sierra or El Capitan?

FocusAndEarnIt

FocusAndEarnIt

macrumors 601
Original poster
May 29, 2005
4,628
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Hi everyone,

I am selling my wife's old white unibody MacBook. It is a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM, and I purposefully swapped out a 128gb SSD and put in a 250GB 5400 RPM drive. I am looking to sell it cheap on Facebook marketplace or craigslist. I do want it to be operable for the person who gets it despite the purposeful downgrade. (I am repurposing the 128gb SSD for my new beloved iMac G4 :) ) I am hoping to get ~150 or so. I've had good luck on Facebook marketplace as of late.

What OS is probably best for this Mac? It came with Snow Leopard back in the day! It is a bit sluggish on 10.13.6 (but then again my main driver is a 16" MBP). I see that Google Chrome supports down to OS X 10.11 El Capitan. I wonder if that would be the best? Besides Mac OS X Tiger & Leopard on PPC, I am a bit out of tune on how supported the older macOS releases are for the early Intel Macs.

Appreciate your input!
 
eyoungren said:
What about splitting it down the middle and just putting it on Sierra?
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I’m considering it. I’m just wondering if people know if a certain macOS that is still somewhat recent in this ballpark would be more favorable to this machine.
 
Wowfunhappy said:
While I haven't tested with hardware quite so old, Sierra isn't any faster than High Sierra in my experience.
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In all honesty, I've never used Sierra. I got as far as El Cap last year and then jumped to Mojave (through the patcher). I'm only familiar with High Sierra because of my work MBP and being stuck on it with my MP (until recently).

High Sierra seems to have a lot of high kernel_task use - at least in my case anyway. It was causing forced logouts on me. Mojave hasn't done that and I haven't even seen that process come up since I left High Sierra.

I was just thinking maybe High Sierra was an anomaly in that regard and that maybe Sierra didn't have that problem. Kind of the same thing like when Mavericks introduced the SMB bug that wasn't present in Mountain Lion.
 
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After experiencing both El Cap and High Sierra on my '09 Mini, I would suggest High Sierra. El Cap is being abandoned by Firefox this year and I have a feeling more developers will follow suit, so I think moving to High Sierra would be best for application compatibility. I believe buyers would prefer High Sierra for this reason.
 
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I would even say Mojave, since then at least they get Dark Mode support. I run Mojave on 2010 Macs and it works just as well as High Sierra.
 
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I would stick to high sierra.
because if you're going to patch mojave on there there is a chance the buyer is going to try to install security updates or something and break the system.
 
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Also if the buyer did want to run unsupported Mac OS it's advisable to have the latest supported Mac OS with all security updates installed at some point prior to doing so to get the Boot ROM etc. up to date.

A system that had never been updated past El Capitan wouldn't be able to boot from a disk with the APFS filesystem without some further hacks.
 
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Sold it for $185 cash... that was quick! It had a number of cosmetic issues but still worked like a charm. Hope I didn’t sell it too cheap given how quick it went. A quick glance on eBay suggests I got close to the max I could get for it.
 
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I'm posting from same year Macbook with the 2.0 processor/4 gb/120 gb SSD on El Cap. Mojave with patcher ran ok but had some stutters and the trackpad was not smooth. Chrome and El Cap run better, mostly fast and cool with just the occasional beachball for no apparent reason.
 
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retta283 said:
$185 is actually a much better deal for you than them...
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That's exactly what I was thinking too.

retta283 said:
I've snagged one of these from a bulk listing that was selling them at $25 per unit without HDD. You can usually get a decent shape one for less than $100
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I purchased mine in 2017 for less than £100 GBP and in pristine condition. The seller had listed it as an "iMac A1181." :D Prices for Apple hardware are somewhat higher in the UK, so this was a steal - especially given that it was absolutely immaculate. Even the palm rests were intact! I didn't know that they're officially supported as far as High Sierra: if it's actually faster than El Capitan as @Project Alice has attested then that's an upgrade path for me to consider for several of my machines. :)
 
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eyoungren said:
In all honesty, I've never used Sierra. I got as far as El Cap last year and then jumped to Mojave (through the patcher). I'm only familiar with High Sierra because of my work MBP and being stuck on it with my MP (until recently).

High Sierra seems to have a lot of high kernel_task use - at least in my case anyway. It was causing forced logouts on me. Mojave hasn't done that and I haven't even seen that process come up since I left High Sierra.

I was just thinking maybe High Sierra was an anomaly in that regard and that maybe Sierra didn't have that problem. Kind of the same thing like when Mavericks introduced the SMB bug that wasn't present in Mountain Lion.
Click to expand...
Sierra seems to run fine on my early '09 MB. No forced logouts or anything, and that's with only 4GB of Ram and a 2GHz C2D. I've always thought of it as pretty much El Capitan with tweaks since not much changed and it wasn't a total mess on launch like High Sierra or Mojave.
MacFoxG4 said:
After experiencing both El Cap and High Sierra on my '09 Mini, I would suggest High Sierra. El Cap is being abandoned by Firefox this year and I have a feeling more developers will follow suit, so I think moving to High Sierra would be best for application compatibility. I believe buyers would prefer High Sierra for this reason.
Click to expand...
That's a shame that El Cap is being abandoned, it's a really good OS. Maybe I'll have to just run Windows and Linux on my MP 1,1. Darn SSE4 requirement.:(
 
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TheShortTimer said:
That's exactly what I was thinking too.



I purchased mine in 2017 for less than £100 GBP and in pristine condition. The seller had listed it as an "iMac A1181." :D Prices for Apple hardware are somewhat higher in the UK, so this was a steal - especially given that it was absolutely immaculate. Even the palm rests were intact! I didn't know that they're officially supported as far as High Sierra: if it's actually faster than El Capitan as @Project Alice has attested then that's an upgrade path for me to consider for several of my machines. :)
Click to expand...

If you have an a1181 and not an a1342 like the tread OP had, it is officially maxed out at El Capitan. It can still be patched up to Catalina.
 
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AL1630 said:
Sierra seems to run fine on my early '09 MB. No forced logouts or anything, and that's with only 4GB of Ram and a 2GHz C2D. I've always thought of it as pretty much El Capitan with tweaks since not much changed and it wasn't a total mess on launch like High Sierra or Mojave.

That's a shame that El Cap is being abandoned, it's a really good OS. Maybe I'll have to just run Windows and Linux on my MP 1,1. Darn SSE4 requirement.:(
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I never had a problem with either. Most people just find things to complain about. HS was better out of the box for me on my 09 Macbook 5,2 than Sierra was. This is part of the reason I stay out of the other forums usually. It's always something. I do agree that quality control has sucked since they switched to a yearly release schedule. But I have never experienced these "unusable bugs" that the Intel forums are loaded with every year.

I can't believe there still isn't an SSE 4 emulator. That or I feel like someone who knows what they're doing would've patched the 1,1/2,1 firmware to accept later CPUs by now.
 
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