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lixe

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 26, 2010
57
1
Hi there,

I'm trying to get the most out of an MacBook 2008 Unibody, 2GHz, 4GB RAM and 500GB SSD. I guess Snow Leopard would be the fastest OS, but then Apple Music wouldn’t be possible. And I also guess Mojave would use to much resources just for running, so it wont be a wise choice either. So which OS would you choose, so most of todays software and services would work, but also to get most speed as possible, even if it wont be fast...
 

retta283

Suspended
Jun 8, 2018
3,180
3,482
Hi there,

I'm trying to get the most out of an MacBook 2008 Unibody, 2GHz, 4GB RAM and 500GB SSD. I guess Snow Leopard would be the fastest OS, but then Apple Music wouldn’t be possible. And I also guess Mojave would use to much resources just for running, so it wont be a wise choice either. So which OS would you choose, so most of todays software and services would work, but also to get most speed as possible, even if it wont be fast...
Mojave is so buggy on unsupported machines anyway.

Snow Leopard doesn't have much app support, but is blazing fast. Same with Leopard. Lion-Mountain Lion run worse but have similar support to SL, so not much reason to use them. Mavericks has much better, if still lacking app support, but can run an up-to-date version of Firefox. Honestly I think the best bet would be the regular Sierra. Runs well without many issues, esp. with an SSD and more RAM (which you have already) Pretty up to date and has good support still.

You can also always partition your drive and install multiple OSes, but it takes space.
 

daedbird

macrumors newbie
Mar 13, 2019
4
6
Got the 08', with SSD, 8gb RAM, and running El Capitan.....it is the newest system you can run. may have some workarounds, but will run everything you have been running. Nearly as fast as my 2015 MBP, really. Works great.

Starting to notice El Cap has some issues with a couple of sites, but she should be good....

You cannot run Sierra, as it is not supported.
 

retta283

Suspended
Jun 8, 2018
3,180
3,482
Got the 08', with SSD, 8gb RAM, and running El Capitan.....it is the newest system you can run. may have some workarounds, but will run everything you have been running. Nearly as fast as my 2015 MBP, really. Works great.

Starting to notice El Cap has some issues with a couple of sites, but she should be good....

You cannot run Sierra, as it is not supported.
You can run Sierra, High Sierra, and Mojave using dosdude1's patches. Very simple process. Would not recommend doing this with Mojave though, too buggy. Sierra is flawless.
 
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