Run a quick hardware check on your Mac to make sure it’s up for the task. Especially your storage media will have a good workout during this process. You want to make sure your Mac is physically in good shape before subjecting it to an OS upgrade. Whatever your poison, make a clone if you can. There are quite a few solutions out there to clone a drive but here are some common ones: If you want to boot and work from a clone drive however, you don’t want to be stuck with a USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 drive. For the cloning process itself slower drives don’t pose a problem, it just takes longer to copy all the data. FireWire 800, USB 3.0, eSATA or Thunderbolt. Both can be used to restore data from if a system needs to be re-installed after a problem occurs but a clone drive allows you to boot up from it and be back in business right away.Ĭloning your drive is a straightforward process, just make sure you use a fast drive. Ideally you want to have at least a Time Machine backup and a full drive clone. The potential for something to go wrong is big. Upgrading an operating system is just a progress bar to the user but behind the scenes millions of files are being moved around. You want a solid backup of all your data, preferably two or more. Of course there is plenty to enjoy in Sierra without these few features if your Mac is older.Įnough about hardware, my Mac can take Sierra, what’s next? These features, included in Sierra, require much newer hardware than that listed above. Some of the new features folks are pretty excited about are: Still in the running? Nice! A few small notes before we continue. If you have a MacBook Air, thin iMac (21.5″) or a Retina laptop, you are stuck with what you got. Luckily having an older Mac likely also means you can open it up and upgrade the Ram yourself. If your Mac is an older model it may need a RAM upgrade to run Sierra smoothly (8GB recommended, by me, not Apple). It should give you all kinds of useful info, including the model of your Mac.įrom the above hardware list, every Mac is able to use 8GB of RAM or more. ![]() To get the model information in that case go here and type in your Mac’s serial number. ![]() Older operating systems won’t list the model number like this. To check the exact model of your Mac, go to the Apple menu > About This mac. Between all of the Macs a whopping 27 models were cut from eligibility with the MacBook Pro having the most casualties. ![]() Whereas for El Capitan a Mid 2007 iMac was enough, now a Late 2009 or newer model is required. The Xserve has been cut from the list completely and every other Mac model got a 1-2 year jump. ![]() If your Mac was able to run El Capitan, this does not mean it can handle Sierra. By the way, unlike El Capitan, I found Sierra to run really smooth on a HDD system. You want to free up at least 20GB and preferably more, especially if your Mac uses a spinning hard drive (HDD). If your hard drive has less than 10GB free your system is most likely already experiencing sluggish performance, even if your Mac uses a Solid State Drive (SSD, also called Flash memory). This is the space you need to download and run the Sierra installer. To effectively run the operating system + your applications, these days you want a minimum of 4GB or a much recommended 8GB if you want your Mac to last a while.Ĩ.8GB of available storage space is not much. At this point it is unknown if Apple will keep El Capitan available for download in the App Store after Sierra is released so you may want to download El Capitan before lunch, just to make sure it’s on your drive and available in your App Store purchase history.ĢGB of memory (RAM) has not been enough to get anything productive done for over 5 years, in my humble opinion. After that upgrade you can make the step to Sierra. If your Mac runs 10.6.8, update it to 10.11.6 El Capitan first. The minimum requirements has been 10.6.8 for years but Snow Leopard users will no longer be able to upgrade to the latest version of macOS. Read carefully, as of Sierra your Mac needs to run 10.7.5 (Lion) or later. That’s one option, however I do recommend reading this post to avoid any nasty surprises.įirst things first, can your Mac even run Sierra? Today is the day, the latest Mac operating system hits the virtual shelves in the afternoon and we will be updating our Macs en masse because who doesn’t want to play with Siri on the Mac! Of course you don’t need to read this post, just update as soon as you see Sierra pop up in the App Store and wish for the best.
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