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What is the best OS X for an Air 2010?

LeandrodaFL

LeandrodaFL

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 6, 2011
973
1
Hi, everyone. I have an Air 11" 2010 2GB with Snow Leopard. Im finally going to upgrade the OS, what is the best version I can install on this machine? Im asking cause sometimes the latest os is not actually best, as it may have bugs and performance issues with my specific mac model..

I know I have to first upgrade to either El Captain or Yosemite. And later I will have the option of upgrading to Sierra or High Sierra. So basically these are the 4 options. Should I go with High Sierra in the end?

Thanks in advance for the replies, and have a great day!
 
I would personally go with El Cap. I have. 2011 11” Air (i5/2GB/128GB) and, same as yours, the primary limitation of the machine is it’s 2GB of RAM. I’ve upgraded it to High Sierra twice now, and both times after a week or two I roll it back to El Cap. Everything after is just a smidge too heavy for it to be terribly pleasant to use, and I use mine lightly. It primarily runs a couple of screen sharing sessions for me to control other computers in my classroom. Even with that light use, I find that it’s sluggish under High Sierra and chugs far more than under El Cap.
 
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LeandrodaFL said:
Hi, everyone. I have an Air 11" 2010 2GB with Snow Leopard.
Click to expand...
I have the same machine and have decided to keep it on El Cap, despite my love for Mojave's Dark Mode. El Cap doesn't hold a candle to Snow Leopard in terms of speed but there's always a tradeoff.
 
MOJAVE!
then Mountain Lion, the responses is great and can keep the ipad up to par.

the most important aspect is:
what do you need? internets, ipad exchange, graphic design?

im downloading a linux unbuntu 18.94 now for an 128 SSD drive
then will switch everything to that by July 1,2021
 
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Amethyst1 said:
I have the same machine and have decided to keep it on El Cap, despite my love for Mojave's Dark Mode. El Cap doesn't hold a candle to Snow Leopard in terms of speed but there's always a tradeoff.
Click to expand...
I was on High Sierra for quite some time on my MP. I found this and it works pretty well. It's a pretty good substitute and gets UI elements dark. As a service you have to run it for each app you have open, but if you assign a keyboard shortcut to it then that can work pretty quick.

I recently (yesterday) put it on my work MBP as that Mac is stuck on High Sierra due to work app limitations.

El Capitan minimum for this item. A pretty good Dark mode for pre-Mojave systems without XtraFinder is a decent deal I think.

PS. I do still use XtraFinder with all of this (on High Sierra systems), but that's solely to have the old style Finder labels.

PPS. If you use Lite Icon you can also edit system icons. I have my old PowerPC icon set on my Mac Pro (Mojave) using that app.
 
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LeandrodaFL said:
Hi, everyone. I have an Air 11" 2010 2GB with Snow Leopard. Im finally going to upgrade the OS, what is the best version I can install on this machine? Im asking cause sometimes the latest os is not actually best, as it may have bugs and performance issues with my specific mac model..

I know I have to first upgrade to either El Captain or Yosemite. And later I will have the option of upgrading to Sierra or High Sierra. So basically these are the 4 options. Should I go with High Sierra in the end?

Thanks in advance for the replies, and have a great day!
Click to expand...
As others had noted, the limitation of your 11" Air is that 2Gb Ram which limits performance more than anything else with newer OSes except Linux. Usually upgrading to later OSes is to keep up with the security updates and some features that are only supported in the newer OS. Since all the 4 OSes are no longer supported by Apple and since Apple and Google and the rest of the CA community had gone to a 1 year SSL/TSL certificate renewal format opposed to 2 years before Sept 2020 and 3-5 years before that in order to browse the web more securely and effectively, security updates will be more of a necessity moving forward with older machines if you want those secured websites to load properly on your browser. Even if you went with High Sierra, the OS had not received any security updates since November 2020 and so, you need to have a big reason as to why you need to go High Sierra.

My take with the best os version is a version that allows you to receive the latest security updates.

If security updates is important to you, then you may want to consider installing Linux on your Air and dual boot between your current OS and Linux. If not, then staying in Snow Leopard may not be a bad idea as it is a stable OS as is.
 
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Personally I have what I feel to be the best of three macOS worlds set-up on my 2GB 2010 11" MBA: Snow Leopard, Mojave and Catalina. The latter two have been tweaked and optimised to obtain the best results and they run far better than the Linux distros that I tried and failed to get working.

Contrary to expectations, Catalina goes like the clappers despite the machine possessing half the minimum RAM requirements stipulated by Apple. From my experiences, it's possible to venture beyond Snow Leopard or even High Sierra and still enjoy good performance. :)
 
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Amethyst1 said:
In your experience or opinion, does Catalina offer anything (besides an obviously longer period of security updates) that make it worth having next to, or instead of, Mojave?
Click to expand...

That's a very good question. :) It's still early days yet but I haven't seen anything decisive so far. At the moment it's just nice to have the option available to me. In Mojave's favour, it has the advantage of 32 bit compatibility and HFS partitions that can be read/seen by older versions of MacOS.

I'll need to spend some more time investigating Catalina.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
Which is my number one reason for sticking with it :)
Click to expand...

Which is precisely why I have it amongst my triple-boot. :) Snow Leopard needs no explanation and as I've mentioned elsewhere, Mojave runs just as well as High Sierra and El Capitan but with numerous advantages and improvements over those predecessors so I could dispense with the pair without hesitation. Meanwhile, Catalina is just nice to have on hand as a demonstration of the MBA's continued (and impressive) viability (along with Apple's shadiness) and the scope for future possibilities in terms of software.
 
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I wasnt expecting so many answers!!!

The Air is my "travel pc" and I only need it to acess social media, and trading platforms, wich I can no longer do in the very old firefox/chrome versions available for Snow Leopard. The screen goes blank or in a constant loop. Oh, acessing Mega is also important
 
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LeandrodaFL said:
I wasnt expecting so many answers!!!

The Air is my "travel pc" and I only need it to acess social media, and trading platforms, wich I can no longer do in the very old firefox/chrome versions available for Snow Leopard. The screen goes blank or in a constant loop. Oh, acessing Mega is also important
Click to expand...

You can go as far as Catalina if you desire - which would definitely provide you access to newer browsers. I also use MEGA and I've just tested it with the following Snow Leopard compatible browsers from this list:

Arctic Fox
Firefox Legacy
Interweb
Spiderweb
TenSixFox

They are all met with the following message:

LOVbwEe.png


Unless the ever knowledgeable @wicknix is aware of a workaround, you'll very likely need El Capitan or above for accessing MEGA.
 
TheShortTimer said:
You can go as far as Catalina if you desire - which would definitely provide you access to newer browsers. I also use MEGA and I've just tested it with the following Snow Leopard compatible browsers from this list:

Arctic Fox
Firefox Legacy
Interweb
Spiderweb
TenSixFox

They are all met with the following message:

LOVbwEe.png


Unless the ever knowledgeable @wicknix is aware of a workaround, you'll very likely need El Capitan or above for accessing MEGA.
Click to expand...
Why can't you just use a user agent switcher addon with a current user agent?
 
TheShortTimer said:
Please enlighten me as to how this would be accomplished. :)
Click to expand...
Mozilla browsers are all capable of using addons. uMatrix is one example of an addon - which I've used in Firefox on my Intels and especially in T4Fx on my PowerPC Macs.

There has to be user agent addons somewhere, I used one for years, it was even called User Agent Switcher. The way this works is that you insert the useragent string you want to spoof as and the addon shows that to the website.

For instance, my current user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.79 Safari/537.36

^Identifies me as using a Intel Mac running OSX 10.15.7 with Chrome/Safari functionality (I'm using Vivaldi).

Here's one I picked at random: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36

If I were to drop that in to an addon, I'd be identified as using Windows 10 and running a browser with Chrome/Safari functionality (probably Chrome).

Additionally, all Mozilla based browsers offer a about:config tweak where you can specify directly how you want to be identified.

You can see your current user agent by asking Google "What's my User Agent?"

Identifying as using a browser that the site supports is a gate check. A lot of the time your browser is still capable and just telling the website you have 'blah, blah, blah' browser is enough for the site to let you in. Other times there is a more intensive check and those are the ones where spoofing a user agent won't work.

You can also spoof mobile phone agents, which is how Classilla works.
 
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LeandrodaFL said:
Hi, everyone. I have an Air 11" 2010 2GB with Snow Leopard. Im finally going to upgrade the OS, what is the best version I can install on this machine? Im asking cause sometimes the latest os is not actually best, as it may have bugs and performance issues with my specific mac model..

I know I have to first upgrade to either El Captain or Yosemite. And later I will have the option of upgrading to Sierra or High Sierra. So basically these are the 4 options. Should I go with High Sierra in the end?

Thanks in advance for the replies, and have a great day!
Click to expand...
Hello,

I have the exact same 11" MacBook Air, the only difference is I have 4 GB Ram in mine. I have mine running High Sierra and I really like it a lot. I have quite a few other Macs in the house so compared to them this Air is not as zippy for sure, but I really like all the features of High Sierra and want to use a system that will keep me as up to date as possible so that's my reason for upgrading to that. I know that I could hack Catalina on this, but I'm not ready to try that, although I might in the future. I hope this info helps a little.

Anyways, I really like the 11" Airs a lot, they are great to travel with, so I hope you enjoy yours as well!

:)

P.S. I got this machine free when I found it in the recycle bin at work because the battery had swollen and the person using it had tossed it...A new OWC battery and everything is great! I love rescuing Macs that other people toss and save them from getting recycled.
 
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TheShortTimer said:
Personally I have what I feel to be the best of three macOS worlds set-up on my 2GB 2010 11" MBA: Snow Leopard, Mojave and Catalina. The latter two have been tweaked and optimised to obtain the best results and they run far better than the Linux distros that I tried and failed to get working.

Contrary to expectations, Catalina goes like the clappers despite the machine possessing half the minimum RAM requirements stipulated by Apple. From my experiences, it's possible to venture beyond Snow Leopard or even High Sierra and still enjoy good performance. :)
Click to expand...

Hi,

I’m super intrigued with you running Catalina on your machine. If possible could you please let us know how you like it after you’ve used it a while? I just finished upgrading 3 other machines in the house to Catalina but have hesitated doing so to the 11” Air.

Thanks!!
 
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DouglasCarroll said:
Hi,

I’m super intrigued with you running Catalina on your machine. If possible could you please let us know how you like it after you’ve used it a while? I just finished upgrading 3 other machines in the house to Catalina but have hesitated doing so to the 11” Air.

Thanks!!
Click to expand...

Ok, I'll create a thread in which I'll discuss my experiences with Catalina and the C2D 11" Air. I can assure you though that if it works great on my 2GB machine then it will be even better on your 4GB Air. :)
 
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Okay, so I went ahead and upgraded my 11" Late 2010 Macbook Air to Catalina with DosDude1's patcher and it's working great, I'm really satisfied with the upgrade and performance. The only difference is that mine has 4 GB of ram, not 2GB like the original poster of this thread. Everything I've tried works perfectly and I'm now 100% up to date with security and browsers for at least the next few years.

FYI, I'm also running unsupported Catalina on the following mac laptops and it runs just fine on both of them: 2008 13" Aluminum Macbook & 2009 13" Macbook Pro.

Hope this info helps!

:)
 
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I have a 2010 11" MacBook Air with 2 GB RAM/64 GB SSD and I'll also chime in for El Capitan being the best OS to use. Mind you, if you had a 4 GB/128 GB SSD MacBook Air I'd feel more comfortable recommending going straight to High Sierra.
 
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The best OSX for a Macbook air 2010 (4gb) without the throttle is
El Capitan!
today i used that macbook air for internet browsing, heavy CS4 Photoshop, video editing
without heat, throttling or any slowing down
Safari 9.1 worked well and Brave worked better, but safari did more faster somehow.
This OSX will work with ipads and other devices with itunes 12.?
there is no pop up wanting to log into apple to activate chat-thing (forgot what they call call program)
or messages, since my apple account was deactivated and i could still download, use and run programs.

these are great computers and will last, no matter how tim cook despises these laptops

i hoped this helps!
 
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