Updating Mac OS

The time has come for me to upgrade from Snow Leopard (!) on my MacPro (2008) and I have two questions:

1) can I still download Yosemite?  I used this on my work Macs and don't necessarily want to upgrade to El Capitan unless there is no other choice.
2) I am pretty sure I upgraded from Leopard to Sl without having to do anything special (aside from making sure all my backups were up to date, which they always are).  Is this just a matter of downloading the OS and letting it install on its own?

Thanks for the help.

Hi Martin,

Re 1) I highly doubt that you can upgrade only to Yosemite.

Re 2) It should be smooth sailing though of course make a bootable backup beforehand - and make sure it works.

Best, Joerg

Thanks Joerg. OK so assuming I cannot upgrade to yosemite, are there any known issues with El Capitan? I know it has been around for a while, but I am running a relatively old machine. In particular, I know will have to upgrade some of my software (like EyeOne) but I am also running PS CS5 – does this present a problem? I have zero desire to upgrade to Adobe's latest version. TIA

Just came across a link that sells Yosemite via a USB bootable stick. Can I upgrade from SL to Yosemite directly from this thumbdrive or is this just meant to be used in emergency situations when an already installed version of Yosemite starts acting up?

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-Yosemite-10-1 ... B00S4ZIO88

A machine with Snow Leopard could be upgraded to Yosemite but you'd need the Yosemite Installer to do it. It is NOT available from Apple.

I would wonder though, any machine still running Snow Leopard would be VERY OLD. I still have one machine on Snow Leopard and I simply don't use it anymore since it is old, heavy and slow. You should seriously consider buying an older machine from a trusted source, like say MacSales, that comes with the version of the OS that you are looking for. I'd also wonder why you want to go all the way to 10.10 from 10.6 when 10.8 and 10.9 run things from the 10.6 era much better than 10.10 does.

Martin, yes that could work. My brief comment above was assuming that you want to pursue only Apple certified/approved upgrade paths. Anyway, personally I wouldn't be too comfortable trusting such source though... I think Anthony's suggestion about buying a "new" machine from Macsales with Yosemite installed is better. I share his concern about your old machine being able to run Yosemite...

I am still running Yosemite myself and haven't paid attention to El Capitan too much. So, I can't tell you about (in)compatibility issues but CS5 should run...

Joerg

Joerg and Anthony,

Thanks for the advice and yes in an ideal world I would upgrade my computer as this would solve a lot of issues for me. But I can't afford to do so right now and my current OS (SL) is so old that the browsers I currently use (Safari, Firefox, and Chrome), among other software, do not support this OS any longer. FWIW, I only use this Mac for browsing, PS and LR. I think I am like most users in that I am trying to maintain my current workflow by minimizing changes and more importantly, expenses.

The reason for upgrading to Yosemite is because the Macs I use at work run Yosemite, and I am very familiar with its nuances – I have not used any other versions of OS X between SL and Yosemite. I also assume (perhaps incorrectly) that support for 10.8 and 10.9 will go away sooner than for 10.10 and I am just as unlikely to find an upgrade to these OSs as I am to Yosemite. I am reticent to upgrade to El Capitan because there is a chance my current Mac is too old to be upgraded to this OS.

Thanks for the help and suggestions – as always, very much appreciated.

http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/

SL to EC looks to be possible.

I'd be interested in knowing which machine you have. You can see that by using the Apple/about this mac selection. If I'm correct, you don't have USB 3.0 and might even have FW 400 on that machine. That means experimenting with alternate "boot Drives" would be a really slow process.

Directly doing ANY upgrade to the OS on a machine that old could brick the machine and make it totally not usable at all leaving you no choice but upgrading the machine. After all, upgrading the internal hard drive first means you have nothing to go back to if it doesn't work properly.

Are you sure about not wanting to look at good, used machines?

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Apple_Sy ... 1308436490

Red Alert! Look out, Martin. You are about to turn your laptop into a doorstop. Your current OS is made for your current hardware. If you try to "upgrade" a long way across several new OS's like you say, you will ruin your rig. The newer OS's need the newer hardware and will only destroy older hardware. Been there, done that. Once you upgrade an OS with Apple, you can't go back as far as I can tell.

Steve Cirone wrote:Red Alert!  Look out, Martin.  You are about to turn your laptop into a doorstop.  Your current OS is made for your current hardware.  If you try to "upgrade" a long way across several new OS's like you say, you will ruin your rig.  The newer OS's need the newer hardware and will only destroy older hardware.  Been there, done that.  Once you upgrade an OS with Apple, you can't go back as far as I can tell.

Interesting, - your and Anthony's comments actually mean that you have to buy into new hardware whenever Apple launches a new OS. No wonder Apple is a very wealthy company . I have a mid 2010 Macbook pro with 8 GB RAM which still has Snow Leopard installed. So I'm in the same boat as Martin. Since I'm not  willing to use that $ 2700 MB pro as a doorstop yet, I have not upgraded the OS either,  the more as I had read about many issues - at least with Mountain Lion and Mavericks. In fact LR 6, Capture One 9 , DPP 4 etc don't run with SL and turned my Macbook into a Windows machine via Bootcamp. I had bought the MB pro because of the superior screen at that time. But based on the evident upgrade issues mentioned here I'm pretty much in a dead end street and seriously question myself if my next Laptop I'll buy for my trips can be a Apple product again. If you're completely dependent on the Apple world you're mileage will have to vary, of course.

Wolfgang

No, I didn't mean to imply that you needed new hardware any time you want to upgrade. However, a mid 2010 model is a bit dated having a 2 core processor,  2 USB 2.0 ports and a FW 800 port. That makes the internal drive the only reasonable boot drive. The USB 2.0 ports are definitely too slow and the FW 800 port is marginal at best as a boot drive.

If you are really serious about upgrading the software on that machine, the first step is to clone the boot drive onto an external drive, using the fastest port, the FW 800 port, and test the machine to see if you can boot that drive properly. The software I use is SuperDuper but Carbon Copy would work also. Once you have a working external boot drive, then it would be possible to test upgrade that drive to see how the machine reacts to the upgrade. Or upgrade the main drive leaving the external as a backup you can boot and go back to if things don't work out. Anyway you put it, it is the only safe way to get the machine to another OS while giving you a reasonable out.

A third possibility is to make several external clones that with 2.5" drives and swap the internal with one of those clones then upgrade it. If it doesn't work out, you could then put the original drive back into place.

Doing the upgrade without backup drives is dangerous since if things go wrong, you can't get back to where you were, possibly leaving you with a partially working or not working machine which is what I was saying in the first place.I don't agree with the statement that you can't put newer OS's on an older machine. However, the older the machine is, the more chance that the newer OS will not run well on that machine since it isn't nearly as powerful as a more current machine. My Snow Leopard machine is older than 2010, with a 6GB maximum and a FW 400 port instead of the FW 800 port. I wouldn't even consider bringing that machine up to current specs. On the other hand, that machine can run my oldest software, loading it straight from CD as it has an internal reader. And Snow Leopard still was using Rosetta, which allowed running of PowerPC programs too. I wouldn't consider using it for internet or mail use as those programs are dated at best with that OS.

I'm just in the middle of moving to El Capitan on my 2010 MBP (8Gb ram and SSD installed) and so far she's running sweet, early days at the moment though (first day live today). So far I like it, gives a bit of a more modern look to OS X, quite like the new font as well seems nice and clear to me.

Current install is a fresh build, I find that like Windows, Macs do slowdown over time, I previously upgraded from SL to ML then Mavericks which I upgraded to EC last week, upgrade went fine but it did not fix a couple of slow issues I had been experiencing for a while, hence the fresh build. The only issue I've seen so far is it has disabled my version of iPhoto, no doubt part of the drive to push the new Photos App.
I also appreciate that mine was a stepped upgrade not a single large jump like the OP is proposing.

Anyway the key is to get prepared, use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to take a complete bootable copy of your current system onto a USB or Firewire connected hard drive, if things go badly or you find something you are not happy with you can just re-image back to where you started, well worth the price of a £35-£40 hard drive and a few hours of time. (You should also be able to boot off your backup copy to check it out prior to starting any upgrade on your original setup).

As for downloading Yosemite, that's a yes and no, if you didn't "buy" Yosemite in the App store when it was available, then no, if you did "buy" it then you can download it again using the same Apple ID account that originally bought it. That's very relevant at the moment because a couple of weeks ago Apple revoked all the certificates of the installers for previous versions, you can still use those but you have to trick them by configuring a date before the certificates were revoked during the install process. If previously purchased you can download a new installer for the older versions with a current certificate, (just done this myself for Mountain Lion, Mavericks and El Capitan).

Since realising that I couldn't get Yosemite because I didn't download it when it was available, I will accept any future upgrades but not actually install them. I managed to get Yosemite from a friends machine and created a bootable USB flash drive on his machine (annoyingly just before they revoked its certificate, so may have to re-visit that one again), but I now have install media for SL, ML, Mavericks, Yosemite and EC.

I'll be working my way through my Applications to install list over the next few days, so will report back on how it all goes.

Kev

PS for Wolfgang, can't see why you think you are in dead end street, I used Mavericks on my mid 2010 MBP without any issues for over a year, DPP4, CaptureOne 8 used with no problems. CaptureOne 9 is why I'm looking at the move to Yosemite/El Capitan, in a way my biggest peeve with this Mac is I can't find a valid reason that justifies the cost of an upgrade to a later model. I bumped the RAM to 8Gb and installed an SSD when it was about 18 months old and haven't looked back. Sure it won't be as fast as the later models, but for my use it's plenty quick enough, I expect to get a few more years out of it yet.

I have the installers for 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 if someone decided to go in that direction. The files are large however and need to be put on a physical media to get to you so you need to take that into consideration.

Steve Cirone wrote:Red Alert!  Look out, Martin.  You are about to turn your laptop into a doorstop.  Your current OS is made for your current hardware.  If you try to "upgrade" a long way across several new OS's like you say, you will ruin your rig.  The newer OS's need the newer hardware and will only destroy older hardware.  Been there, done that.  Once you upgrade an OS with Apple, you can't go back as far as I can tell.

This is pure nonsense. I have an early 2008 Macbook Pro running both Snow Leopard and El Capitan in separate partitions. The El Capitan partition boots and runs flawlessly. The claim that a new OS will "ruin" or "destroy" your computer is absurd. 

 John

John Guastella wrote:I have an early 2008 Macbook Pro running both Snow Leopard and El Capitan in separate partitions. The El Capitan partition boots and runs flawlessly. The claim that a new OS will "ruin" or "destroy" your computer is absurd. 

 John

You took the time to create two partitions and have two OS's operating. That required at minimum a new hard drive and cloning the original OS onto it. Without that, if something had gone wrong in the upgrade, you would now have nothing. I simply advise that that moving to a newer OS without precautions is dangerous. The solution you took works well. You still have the old OS for somethings and the new OS for other things, which is what I think the original poster needs at minimum. Or do you now think that the Snow Leopard partition was a waste of time?

John Guastella wrote:

Steve Cirone wrote:Red Alert!  Look out, Martin.  You are about to turn your laptop into a doorstop.  Your current OS is made for your current hardware.  If you try to "upgrade" a long way across several new OS's like you say, you will ruin your rig.  The newer OS's need the newer hardware and will only destroy older hardware.  Been there, done that.  Once you upgrade an OS with Apple, you can't go back as far as I can tell.

This is pure nonsense. I have an early 2008 Macbook Pro running both Snow Leopard and El Capitan in separate partitions. The El Capitan partition boots and runs flawlessly. The claim that a new OS will "ruin" or "destroy" your computer is absurd. 

 John

Hello John,

Sorry to post what happened to me and upset you.  I am not a computer expert, and with your post, you do look to understand computers well.  I am very into photography, but NOT computers.  All I can say is that I had an mac phone rep guide me through "updating" my $3000 iMac running snow leopard.  I went to Maverics.  Once the "update" was complete, the computer was essentially a doorstop.  I took it to a local Mac shop and they rebuilt it with a new HD and a lot of ram, etc. to the tune of $2000, and installed Maverics.  At this point it is about 3X slower than when I was running Snow Leopard. Yes, I likely got screwed.

So, yes, it looks possible to do all sorts of OS changes and so called "upgrades" to a computer by a person such as yourself who is a computer expert,  but for someone like me who doesn't know much about computers, it can be very problematic and expensive.  For you, it is likely a breeze.

So, bravo, Amigo. 

Your nonsensical and absurd pal, Steve Cirone.