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Thinking of coming back to Mavericks, what is your opinion ?

M

mgherghina

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 20, 2016
1
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So Im currently using El Cap, which is ok for the matter. But i honestly feel like going back to mavericks would be way more efficient for me because my Macbook pro would probably run faster, and possibly higher battery life. So heres the thing , I have a Macbook Pro8,1 (early 2011) Dual-Core i5 2.3 GHz

. Over the years i have replaced the stock hardware with this

- 16GB (2X8GB) 1600MHz memory modules -Corsair
- Took out the optical drive
- Re-applied Artic Silver MX-5 thermal paste on CPU
- Cleared out all dust
- Replaced HDD with Crucial MX200 250GB SSD
- I replaced my Battery recently, with this [http://www.amazon.com/Key-Power-Lap...1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage]

Obviously I would have to enable trim on Mavericks, and possibly do a few more selected SSD terminal modifications for Mavericks in order to have it play compatible with SSD's. From this other forum on this website[https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-ssd-tweaking-guide.1505922/]

- Should i make the change, is anyone here informed in this matter ... Im using this book for school , and its mostly for my CS classes and possibly messing around as well with another OS or two {\[Im going to install ReFIND to run Linux separately]/}, Im more worried about utility use and battery, I do not, want to have such a resource hog as El Cap.
-Will the change be significant ?
[doublepost=1461477381][/doublepost]Also i feel like El Cap drains my battery so quickly to 5%, and then i just stay at 5% for like 8 Hrs while my Laptop LAGSSS
 
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I'd say your battery problems are more likely due to the fact your battery rather than El Cap. Yes you say you replaced it, but i don't believe apple are still making them so...

I have a 2011, 15" box (with the i7 in it) and have run everything from Lion to El cap on it, and would suggest that if El Cap runs "fast enough" stick with it because you're going to get better security, security updates for longer, and newer applications will continue to support it.

I do not think the change will be significant (and IMHO certainly not worth it), given you have SSD and 16 GB of RAM.

That said, I did like Mavericks, which doesn't seem to be a common version for people to like.
 
I've just recently went from El-Cap back to Mavericks.
Points to consider are files such as "iPhoto Library and iTunes Library" will not be compatible
with Your Mavericks installation so make sure you are prepared to deal with this issue.
Other then that I like having control back with real utilities such as A DiskUtility that works.
 
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I've been running Mavericks since I got my MacBook but I have tested newer versions (including El Cap) on it because I was curious if I could tolerate the disgusting visual design. While nothing about this was measured scientifically, I used the same apps (albeit different versions, obviously) in the same way with the same content and often found my battery to last a couple of hours longer on Mavericks. YMMV, but battery performance was consistently better than El Cap and I get the added benefit of less things I don't want running (and almost no beach balls!). I would say go for it, as long as you are prepared for data migration in apps that use libraries as mentioned in the post above.
 
Avenged110 said:
While nothing about this was measured scientifically, I used the same apps (albeit different versions, obviously) in the same way with the same content and often found my battery to last a couple of hours longer on Mavericks. YMMV, but battery performance was consistently better than El Cap and I get the added benefit of less things I don't want running (and almost no beach balls!).
Click to expand...

Many of the performance optimisations which Apple has added since Yosemite are things that older hardware will not really benefit from anyway (such as Metal, hardware-accelerated video decoding, PowerNap). In return, Yosemite added a lot of unnecessary visual tweaks that seem to be pretty taxing overall. This gaussian-blur effect with the added vibrancy is so overused that you can really feel a performance increase once you turn it off in accessibility settings and I am quite sure that you will notice that in your battery life too. In my own experience, I found that my MacBook runs a wee cooler with Mavericks.
 
KALLT said:
Many of the performance optimisations which Apple has added since Yosemite are things that older hardware will not really benefit from anyway (such as Metal, hardware-accelerated video decoding, PowerNap). In return, Yosemite added a lot of unnecessary visual tweaks that seem to be pretty taxing overall. This gaussian-blur effect with the added vibrancy is so overused that you can really feel a performance increase once you turn it off in accessibility settings and I am quite sure that you will notice that in your battery life too. In my own experience, I found that my MacBook runs a wee cooler with Mavericks.
Click to expand...
While mostly true (Power Nap was added in 10.8 and hardware-accelerated h.264 decode in 2010), I've used it on a more-than-capable Haswell 15" MacBook Pro. That the software felt like it was taxing the hardware on what is still basically the second most powerful mobile platform Apple offers was...disappointing. Also, thank you for bringing that up as heat was also something that caught my attention. My MacBook was almost always consistently 10-15 degrees cooler under most scenarios on Mavericks. Everything on this machine is near-instant on 10.9, while (although brief) something as simple as using System Preferences on 10.11 throws beach balls. Side note: Apple's use of translucency is particularly irritating because it uses so much power to achieve the effect, and yet the old system of occasional transparency was usually more useful and far less resource-intensive.
 
Ok what's a good way to go back to Mavericks from El Capitan? I have a 2013 27 iMac. My recovery hd is Mavericks. What's the best way to migrate data on my El Capitan to Mavericks?
 
My machine is Macbook Air 13 mid 2012 4 GB RAM and I recently went back to mavericks too. Battery is probably better. Yes. BUT.

El Capitan Safari is so much better... It's faster, looks better and pages load clearly faster than in Mavericks Safari.

On top of that, youtube works way better in El Capitan Safari too, you can see that videos are sharper in El Cap Safari than on Mavericks Safari.
 
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Run Mavericks on anything older than a 2012 Machine. With the new UI, the desktop environment has become more demanding. El Cap iaea metal for graphics but only 2012 and later Macs are supported.
 
asoksevil said:
Run Mavericks on anything older than a 2012 Machine. With the new UI, the desktop environment has become more demanding.
Click to expand...

In my limited experience (temporarily using prerelease El Capitan on an early 2011 MacBookPro8,2 with 4 GB memory booted from an external drive on USB 2.0): I don't sense that the DE is more demanding than Mavericks.

Defocusing from the DE: the El Capitan and Yosemite are probably more finely tuned (than Mavericks) for running things with neither quits of apps nor shutdowns of the OS. YMMV.
 
grahamperrin said:
In my limited experience (temporarily using prerelease El Capitan on an early 2011 MacBookPro8,2 with 4 GB memory booted from an external drive on USB 2.0): I don't sense that the DE is more demanding than Mavericks.
Click to expand...

Oh it is. Simply monitoring my cpu usage when performing basic operations such as resizing windows, safari scrolling, navigating menus, etc showed an average 5 to 20% (!) difference, depending on the Mac used (1,1 and 5,1 cMPs - my 1,1 has everything it needs to run El Cap, SSD included). The cpu is working much harder sometimes to make all the fancy stuff look smooth. Now that I have upgraded my 1,1 to 8 cores it's not that big of a deal, but I prefer when my CPUs are reserved for the worthy stuff ;) That's one fo the reasons I've gone back to Mavericks, other reasons had more to do with Pro Tools issues, which is for another discussion. And Lucida Grande...man what a relief! :)

I'm not expecting 10.12 to make things magically less cpu-demanding, but I hope there's enough reasons to upgrade again.
 
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Orka said:
My machine is Macbook Air 13 mid 2012 4 GB RAM and I recently went back to mavericks too. Battery is probably better. Yes. BUT.

El Capitan Safari is so much better... It's faster, looks better and pages load clearly faster than in Mavericks Safari.

On top of that, youtube works way better in El Capitan Safari too, you can see that videos are sharper in El Cap Safari than on Mavericks Safari.
Click to expand...
I think the difference in Safari (Mavericks vs El Capitan) is very minor - especially in daily use. I moved back to Mavericks due to the battery, the memory and mainly the UI which is more comfort for my eyes.
One more, the Preview for PDF is much better in Mavericks, this is very important for me as I read and highlight lot of papers in PDF.
 
Isamilis said:
I think the difference in Safari (Mavericks vs El Capitan) is very minor - especially in daily use. …
Click to expand...

Removal of the title from the title bar stinks. I complained before Yosemite was released … now I spend most of my time with Firefox on PC-BSD.

Using Safari in Mavericks has become a rare pleasure … and my drift away from Apple began so long ago, I sometimes wonder whether my complaints in 2013 were justified. Recently I found that Firefox on El Capitan lost its ability to show the title in the title bar. Now with that Firefox – as in 2013 with Yosemite – I'm frequently disoriented by seeking but not finding the title. Essentially: no regrets about the complaints.

YMMV :) and it's true that most people don't care about what Apple did to Safari, but for the way that I use computers: the mashing-up of the GUI was an aggravation that couldn't be ignored.
 
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