“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?
El Capitan is no Snow Leopard.
Early 2012 MBP 13 inch. El Cap slower throughout, with Safari now distinctly crashy.
El Capitan Version 10.11.1 runs like a champ on my old machine!
Mac Pro (Early 2008)
2 X 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
32 GB 800MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB
NovaBench Score: 910
32768 MB System RAM (Score: 233)
– RAM Speed: 2814 MB/s
CPU Tests (Score: 582)
– Floating Point Operations/Second: 250378416
– Integer Operations/Second: 461687200
– MD5 Hashes Calculated/Second: 821669
Graphics Tests (Score: 57)
– 3D Frames Per Second: 129
Hardware Tests (Score: 38)
– Primary Partition Capacity: 930 GB
– Drive Write Speed: 158 MB/s
The only problem I ran into was the USB 3.0 card that I had installed needed to be removed. Other than that, no issues at all.
Early 2008 Core 2 Duo iMac with 6G ram and 1To mechanical HDD. I power up, then go make some tea – about ready when I get back. Sessions and Apps often painfully slow to open. Once things are running, they’re fine apart from the M$ Office apps, which are another cup of tea job.
An i5 27″ iMac with same specs is on offer for 800€ locally – sorely tempted 🙂