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Opinions - Upgrade 2011 MBA to Yosemite (while it's available)

I

Internaut

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 11, 2009
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All over the place but mostly Somewhere in England
Hi,

I'm a super happy Mavericks user, with a four year old MBA. My laptop still (fingers, toes, etc.) works amazingly well. Is it worth upgrading an MBA, of this vintage, to Yosemite? I'm painfully aware that any upgrade, to a system of this age, could be that one upgrade too far.
 
Internaut said:
Hi,

I'm a super happy Mavericks user, with a four year old MBA. My laptop still (fingers, toes, etc.) works amazingly well. Is it worth upgrading an MBA, of this vintage, to Yosemite? I'm painfully aware that any upgrade, to a system of this age, could be that one upgrade too far.
Click to expand...

I have a 2011 MBA with 4GB of RAM and it's totally fine on Yosemite. I can only imagine that performance will get better with El Capitan.
 
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I've got El Capitan beta running on external USB2 drive on MacBook Air 2011 with 2GB RAM - it is unbelievably snappy. Cannot wait for official release to upgrade to El Capitan as my main OS.
 
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I am running a 2010 MBA on Mavericks 10.9.5 and I am not upgrading anytime soon to El Capitain until it gets all Yosemite´s bugs fixed.
 
I'm running Yosemite on a 2009 Air with a hard disk (1.86GHz C2D, 2GB, 120GB HDD, Nvidia 9400M), and it runs no slower than any previous recent releases. It's perfectly acceptable to me, although I am thinking that an SSD would be a solid investment in this little fellow at some point now.
 
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MultiFinder17 said:
I'm running Yosemite on a 2009 Air with a hard disk (1.86GHz C2D, 2GB, 120GB HDD, Nvidia 9400M), and it runs no slower than any previous recent releases. It's perfectly acceptable to me, although I am thinking that an SSD would be a solid investment in this little fellow at some point now.
Click to expand...

Well that's as good a confirmation as you can get. Spinning disk? You don't know what you're missing. There's a Northern English expression for a well specified Core iX based system, with SSD. Something along the lines of it "It runs like ---t off a shovel"......
 
I tried Yosemite, it has the new "flat" look of IOS7+. Am still holding on to IOS6, so you know I quickly went back to Mavericks. YMMV.
 
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I think you will be fine. Just like Multifinder17 I run Yosemite now on my 2010 MBA with 2GB/128GB after running Mavericks and El Capitan. With El Capitan my fans constantly came on (even after a clean install), Mavericks of course runs fine, but fear that it is not going to be supported with (security) updates after this week, so I switched to Yosemite. It runs maybe a bit slower, but it is still working fine for me.
 
Internaut said:
Well that's as good a confirmation as you can get. Spinning disk? You don't know what you're missing. There's a Northern English expression for a well specified Core iX based system, with SSD. Something along the lines of it "It runs like ---t off a shovel"......
Click to expand...

Oh believe me, I know what I'm missing - every other Mac I have has either an SSD or a Fusion Drive, even going back to my G5 tower :p

This little fellow is my last HDD-based Mac; it's my school computer, to take between home and the classroom (I'm a teacher). It's old, beat up, but still works like a champ.
 
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Internaut said:
Thanks everyone - I'll give it a try this weekend.
Click to expand...

Theres no reason for this decision to be an all-or-nothing affair. If you have enough free harddrive space, you can use disk utility to shrink your Mavericks partition by 20gb or so, create a new partition for Yosemite, and dual boot for a while (press option at boot time to switch between Mavericks and Yosemite) until you are sure Yosemite is the best choice for you.

Your topic title "while its still available", makes it sound like time of the of essence, but it isnt. Download the Yosemite installer, and just keep it handy on a usb stick for future reference (you can do the same with Mavericks, just check it using a known/trusted MD5 to ensure it is an untouched Apple image). Theres no reason you cant compare Mavericks, Yosemite and El Capitan on your internal SSD to make up your mind without any risk of going back or making an irreversible decision, and take all the time you want.

Other options exist also. This is where the disk utility being able to clone partitions onto external drives, or the more simple solution of time machine, come in mighty handy. If you have an external usb drive, you could boot into your recovery partition, clone your working mavericks partition to the external drive, and have a fully bootable backup of your current system. Then if a yosemite upgrade goes sour, just clone it back. The possibilities for non-destructive experimentation are endless.
 
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