Macbook Air 2008 (1,1) - what macOS?

[donluca]

Hello everyone,

what macOS can I put on this Macbook Air? It’s the first one, the 13”.

I see on dosdude1 website that I can’t even put Sierra on it and I was wondering why.

This macbook air has 32 bit EFI but with a 64 bit processor so it should support somehow newer OS.

Any input is highly appreciated!

 

[Steve121178]

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook-air-core-2-duo-1.8-13-specs.html

OS X 10.7 - Lion. It's old...

 

[donluca]

I mean, among the unsupported ones which we are still able to install.

I’ve seen people reporting success with Mountain Lion, but I was hoping for a more… modern solution.

 

[redheeler]

Mountain Lion runs well on unsupported hardware. With anything newer you'll get poor performance due to lack of graphics acceleration, has nothing to do with having a 64-bit processor but rather that Apple never released 64-bit graphics kexts.

If you really want to modernize it with acceptable performance, you'll have to go with a non-Apple OS (Linux or Windows 10). The Late 2008 MacBook Air 2,1 can run later versions of MacOS, even High Sierra unsupported, but the Early 2008 MacBook Air 1,1 is stuck.

 

[donluca]

Well, back to Snow Leopard we go, then… Mountain Lion would run like crap on that machine, it doesn’t even have an SSD.

 

[donluca]

Man, Snow Leopard was such a simple and straightforward OS… I wish Apple would do a barebone OS like that.

Still runs like a charm, using Arctic Fox as a browser, still quite usable.

 

[AustinIllini]

Man, Snow Leopard was such a simple and straightforward OS… I wish Apple would do a barebone OS like that.

Still runs like a charm, using Arctic Fox as a browser, still quite usable.

Most of the OSs now are fairly iterative. I found that High Sierra was great.