“I’m still running OS X 10.10 Yosemite on the MacBook Air, and am resolved to wait until the first bugfix update build at least before committing to an OS X 10.11 El Capitan upgrade on my main machine, but I’ve been curious about El Capitan, which has been described as being analogical to what Snow Leopard was to the preceding OS X 10.5 Leopard — ie: no major new features but more a general refinement, optimization, and bugfix build,” Charles Moore writes for MacPrices. “And miribile dictu, El Capitan is supported by my ancient MacBook, along with most Mac computers introduced in 2007 or later.”
Moore writes, “Despite the fact that it is excluded from most of those marquee OS X 10.11 features, I decided in the interest of science to upgrade that Mountain Lion backup system install on my MacBook to El Capitan anyway, in order to check it out and satisfy my curiosity as to how well the latest Mac OS version actually works on a seven year old, lower-end, Mac laptop, without nuking my Snow Leopard installation on the other partition or messing with my stable Yosemite install on the MacBook Air.”
“So how well does El Capitan work on the old 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo machine? Surprisingly well, actually. My expectations had not been high, but I’m finding the OS quite usable. However, it’s definitely slower and less responsive than Snow Leopard or Mountain Lion on this machine, and based on experience, I would rate Snow Leopard the maximum performance version of OS X for the late-2008 aluminum MacBook,” Moore writes. “With El Capitan, Finder windows and apps open more lazily, as do Save dialogs and such. It’s not super annoying, but you definitely notice it. I do find the sluggishness of the latest iterations of Spotlight annoying, even on my MacBook Air currently in Yosemite for that matter, so it’s no shock to note that it’s even more lackadaisical on the old MacBook running El Capitan.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We don’t have El Capitan running on anything older than a Mid 2011 iMac (granted that one is spec’ed out with a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD for OS X and apps). It runs great!
So, who’s running a really “old” Mac with El Capitan? How’s it working?