Other Relative speed of various OS versions on any given machine?

[DCBassman]

Cannot find any definitive answers on this with regard to early Intel Macs, so here goes: which version is fastest?
I'll qualify this a little and say no earlier than High Sierra, other wise every answer will be Snow Leopard!

 

[Wowfunhappy]

This type of thing is actually really hard to answer definitely. Benchmarks aren't going to show a difference (or at least, not one that maps to your real-world experience) because the raw number-crunching speed of your cpu isn't changing, it's the amount of work performed by the software and libraries in your OS which make a difference.

As a result, you're stuck going off of people's subjective experiences, which is in turn colored by all sorts of things, particularly as most users don't typically go back and fourth between OS versions.

But—since you've blocked out anything earlier than High Sierra, I'm going with High Sierra exactly! We can discard Big Sur and everything after it, because Big Sur came with a clear and obvious speed hit. We can also discard Catalina because it's an awful buggy mess.

That leaves Mojave and High Sierra. Both are solid choices, but on older Intel Macs, I've noticed a slight but perceptible difference in responsiveness between High Sierra and Mojave. My personal belief is this is because Mojave uses Metal more extensively for UI rendering, which should make things faster but which must be less optimized for the GPUs in older models.

 

[ToniCH]

I kind of think there is no easy answer. They are not faster or slower in all tasks compared to others. Some tasks are faster on some OS and others on some other OS. So, you cannot say for example that Monterey is faster than Catalina, even though it might be in some tasks. You need to try it yourself. And even minor OS update versions within a major OS version might have an effect on performance.

 

[ojfd]

Cannot find any definitive answers on this with regard to early Intel Macs, so here goes: which version is fastest?
I'll qualify this a little and say no earlier than High Sierra, other wise every answer will be Snow Leopard!

Early Intel Macs and everything past High Sierra don't play nicely together. 😉

 

[DCBassman]

Early Intel Macs and everything past High Sierra don't play nicely together. 😉

Agree to a point. My 2011 iMac runs Ventura quite well, although I do nothing heavyweight on any machine.

 

[eyoungren]

Early Intel Macs and everything past High Sierra don't play nicely together. 😉

How early is early?

My 2009 Macs all run Mojave well, but my MacPro runs it natively while I need the patcher for my Mac Minis. I'd also add that my MacPro has 32GB of ram and collectively 16TB of hard drive space so there's that.

 

[ojfd]

Why torture yourself? Every new OS comes with new bells and whistles and is designed with current hardware in mind.
The more bells and whistles, the slower it gets, all else being equal. I've observed this for well over 25 years and it was always true. OS6.x was faster than OS7.1, 7.1 was faster than 7.6.1, 7.6.1 was faster than 8.1 ... you get the picture.

I tend to go in the opposite direction - trying to run as early (stable) OS as hardware permits. Quite often with hacks.

 

[wicknix]

In my opinion, and from my real world testing, there isn't a noticeable speed difference from 10.13 - 13.6 at all as long as the machines in question have at least 4gb ram and an SSD installed. My 09 MBP with 6gb ram and a $12 SSD runs 12.7 just as well as it ran 10.11 and 10.15. My 12 core cMP w/64gb ram and 4 SSD's eats whatever i throw at it, and my 2015 iMac also runs everything fine, even patched Ventura. Other than a few seconds difference in boot times, nothing feels any slower the higher i go in MacOS releases.

Cheers

 

[DCBassman]

In my opinion, and from my real world testing, there isn't a noticeable speed difference from 10.13 - 13.6 at all as long as the machines in question have at least 4gb ram and an SSD installed. My 09 MBP with 6gb ram and a $12 SSD runs 12.7 just as well as it ran 10.11 and 10.15. My 12 core cMP w/64gb ram and 4 SSD's eats whatever i throw at it, and my 2015 iMac also runs everything fine, even patched Ventura. Other than a few seconds difference in boot times, nothing feels any slower the higher i go in MacOS releases.

Cheers

Bingo, was hoping this was the approximate real-world experience. Apart from the quirks of Metal, there really doesn't seem to be that much in it.

 

[ojfd]

If you ignore broken (past 10.8) Finder which slows down navigation and fugly, bleached-out UI, you can say that. 😉

 

[PowerHarryG4]

From my experience on my Mac Pro 2013 later Mac OS just feels heavier. I've got my computer partitioned with Monterey and Mavericks currently, however I used to mainly use Mojave only. I'd say I didn't see much of a difference in speed between Mojave and Monterey, apps are slow to open and they both just feel a bit sluggish on this computer at least. But this could be down to later mac OS wanting better single core performance, which this computer doesn't really have. The biggest benefit of Mojave for me was the 32 bit support for apps.

It may not be relevant but I made a simple comparison of Mavericks and Monterey speed on my computers -

 

[DCBassman]

From my experience on my Mac Pro 2013 later Mac OS just feels heavier.

That nails my question well, because the comparison is on a machine that can eat anything.
Is MacOS bloated? The installers are three to four times the size of a Windows .ISO, and take far longer to install, even to upgrade. IMHO there is no more bloated OS out there...And it's not like you get a lot extra for it. Thanks for the info, that essentially is the end of this thread!

 

[spyguy10709]

From my experience on my Mac Pro 2013 later Mac OS just feels heavier. I've got my computer partitioned with Monterey and Mavericks currently, however I used to mainly use Mojave only. I'd say I didn't see much of a difference in speed between Mojave and Monterey, apps are slow to open and they both just feel a bit sluggish on this computer at least. But this could be down to later mac OS wanting better single core performance, which this computer doesn't really have. The biggest benefit of Mojave for me was the 32 bit support for apps.

It may not be relevant but I made a simple comparison of Mavericks and Monterey speed on my computers -

there's absolutely something wrong with your Mac pro or your install of Monterey, maybe with the storage media you're using.

Opening mail with a *heavy* inbox on my retina macbook pro 2013 - upgraded with OCLP takes less than 5 seconds.

Also, you're comparing different versions of third party software. You can't draw the conclusion that "Monterey" is slow, because word 365 is slower than 2013, for example.

 

[GMShadow]

While I feel the pain involved, I really do think Macs need to be nuked/paved after every 3 major version upgrades or so. Definitely seeing some quirks on my 2019 16" which has gone Big Sur > Monterey > Ventura > Sonoma without a wipe, that I don't see on my 5K iMac that's just done Monterey > Ventura > Sonoma.

That nails my question well, because the comparison is on a machine that can eat anything.
Is MacOS bloated? The installers are three to four times the size of a Windows .ISO, and take far longer to install, even to upgrade. IMHO there is no more bloated OS out there...And it's not like you get a lot extra for it. Thanks for the info, that essentially is the end of this thread!

Size of installer really has nothing to do with 'bloat', nor does installed size. macOS does a lot, but it doesn't do all of it at once.

 

[PowerHarryG4]

there's absolutely something wrong with your Mac pro or your install of Monterey, maybe with the storage media you're using.

Opening mail with a *heavy* inbox on my retina macbook pro 2013 - upgraded with OCLP takes less than 5 seconds.

Also, you're comparing different versions of third party software. You can't draw the conclusion that "Monterey" is slow, because word 365 is slower than 2013, for example.

Yeah I agree it’s not the best made video. But later Monterey does have a higher process count so it would make sense that an older computer feels a bit more sluggish on it.

I guess that true with the word software, but you can’t get word 2008 on Monterey. Also I think on an m1 Mac it would probably open pretty quickly.

I can only talk from my experience, Monterey to me definitely feels slower than Mavericks. Mavericks everything feels more snappy. The computer is also generally hotter on Monterey and the fans kick in more often.

I’ve still got my Mac Pro partitioned though, what would be a better comparison?

 

[headlessmike]

This type of thing is actually really hard to answer definitely. Benchmarks aren't going to show a difference (or at least, not one that maps to your real-world experience) because the raw number-crunching speed of your cpu isn't changing, it's the amount of work performed by the software and libraries in your OS which make a difference.

As a result, you're stuck going off of people's subjective experiences, which is in turn colored by all sorts of things, particularly as most users don't typically go back and fourth between OS versions.

But—since you've blocked out anything earlier than High Sierra, I'm going with High Sierra exactly! We can discard Big Sur and everything after it, because Big Sur came with a clear and obvious speed hit. We can also discard Catalina because it's an awful buggy mess.

That leaves Mojave and High Sierra. Both are solid choices, but on older Intel Macs, I've noticed a slight but perceptible difference in responsiveness between High Sierra and Mojave. My personal belief is this is because Mojave uses Metal more extensively for UI rendering, which should make things faster but which must be less optimized for the GPUs in older models.

Big Sur was definitely an improvement over Catalina and Mojave on my 2012 Mac mini in terms of how it performed, despite not officially being supported. Big Sur is my go-to macOS for best performance of anything newer than High Sierra.

 

[ToniCH]

Opening mail with a *heavy* inbox on my retina macbook pro 2013 - upgraded with OCLP takes less than 5 seconds.

Tried this on mine - iMac 2011 i7 with OCLP+Monterey. Lots of software and windows open. Manual stopwatch shows 1.96 seconds to open Mail on top of all that.

 

[headlessmike]

there's absolutely something wrong with your Mac pro or your install of Monterey, maybe with the storage media you're using.

Opening mail with a *heavy* inbox on my retina macbook pro 2013 - upgraded with OCLP takes less than 5 seconds.

Also, you're comparing different versions of third party software. You can't draw the conclusion that "Monterey" is slow, because word 365 is slower than 2013, for example.

Tried this on mine - iMac 2011 i7 with OCLP+Monterey. Lots of software and windows open. Manual stopwatch shows 1.96 seconds to open Mail on top of all that.

Did the same on my 2013 MacBook Pro 13" running Sonoma 14.0 via OCLP 1.0.1. With a stopwatch I measured 2.71 seconds first time opening Mail.app since boot. A Mac Pro of the same vintage should be at least as fast.

 

[PowerHarryG4]

Tried this on mine - iMac 2011 i7 with OCLP+Monterey. Lots of software and windows open. Manual stopwatch shows 1.96 seconds to open Mail on top of all that.

Did the same on my 2013 MacBook Pro 13" running Sonoma 14.0 via OCLP 1.0.1. With a stopwatch I measured 2.71 seconds first time opening Mail.app since boot. A Mac Pro of the same vintage should be at least as fast.

Opening mail with a *heavy* inbox on my retina macbook pro 2013 - upgraded with OCLP takes less than 5 seconds.

Hmm okay I think my mail app was broken on my macbook pro, not really sure how it happened. I just used onyx to rebuild the mailbox and it opens faster now.