iMac 5k 2015 (17,1) runs fine on 10.11 thinking of upgrading to 10.12 or 10.13

Hey, my iMac 5k 2015 (17,1) runs fine on El Capitan but with Mojave on the horizon I am thinking of upgrading to Sierra or High Sierra. Wondering if anyone has any advice? I have a 2012 Macbook Pro at home running Sierra fine but that one runs off an SSD and the iMac is the spinner plus ssd fusion drive thing which has me hesitant about High Sierra. I have an ancient 2009 iMac that I hack upgraded from Sierra to High Sierra and noticed considerable performance improvements in High Sierra than Sierra but that is an old machine so probably not the best benchmark. Anyhow, happy with El Capitan but don't like to stagnate on one OS for too long. Thoughts?

I have that very same iMac. In fact, I'm using it at this very moment running the Mojave beta. I have run both Sierra and High Sierra with no issues. The performace should be similar to the 2012 mqachine in the sense that you will be booting primarilly off of the SSD part of the fusion drive.

If you go to High Sierra it is probably best to let the drive remain formatted as HFS+ extended, journalled. I ran my fusion drive under APFS whe the High Sierra beta was released. I didn't have many issues but that configuration isn't officially supported.

Off hand I don't recall anything that was slower under Sierra / High Sierra than under El Capitan. The one problem I have had is the inability to install Windows 10 in a Bootcamp partition. Not sure why though since others have done it.

Will I get an opportunity on the upgrade to HS to leave the drive HFS?

pacmanz said:

Will I get an opportunity on the upgrade to HS to leave the drive HFS?

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Yes. Provided your Mac's Hard Drive is a spinning platter HD or a Fusion HD. It will remain OS X Extended (Journaled) i.e. HFS+

You have no choice if it was an SSD. That will become formatted as Apple File System (APFS).

Ian

Does the 17,1 support HEVC acceleration and does it matter if it does not?

pacmanz said:

Does the 17,1 support HEVC acceleration and does it matter if it does not?

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Yes it will with High Sierra and later. See the following article from MacRumors.

One of the comments says Hardware HEVC 265 is only supported on mac with Kaby lake procesors. Isn't that the iMac 18,1 not 17,1?

Not according to the article I referred you to:

"All iOS devices running iOS 11 and all Macs on High Sierra will support HEVC playback, with encoding/decoding hardware acceleration on newer iOS devices and the latest 2017 Macs offering faster performance combined with less battery drain. Readers interested in further transcoding details are advised to watch Apple's dedicated HEVC codec video presentation."

"It clearly says that the latest 2017 Macs offer faster performance." However, it also says above that all Macs on High Sierra support HEVC playback.

I suggest you do some checking for yourself. Google and other search engines should point out other articles.

I see. According to this it is only 2017 or later macs that will support hevc with 10 bit color so my machine doesn't fall into that category but still says hevc support.

https://everymac.com/mac-answers/ma...1013-compatible-macs-system-requirements.html

Full release Mojave will, it is reported, allow install on Fusion Drives with APFS so if I had a Fusion machine, would wait until next month or October for the Mojave full release.

I've been running the Mojave beta with APFS and noot had any issues so far other than the problems I had with sounds. Not quite sure what was behind that but it doesn't seem to have been APFS related. APFS has been solid for me so far. I have ntoced a few things to be aware of before updating to APFS. As far as I can tell The following things are true:

1. If your prinmary boot drive is APFS and you for some reason boot from a different drive that is HFS+ formatted The Startup preference pane on the HFS+ installation does not handle things properly. You will think that the APFS drive has been selected but you can't boot that way. You have to hold down the option key on reboot and choose the APFS drive.

2. I'm double checking to find a reference for this but You'll probqably want to avoid formatting your Time Machine drive as APFS -- especially if yiou might need that backup on a different OS. Support of APFS in other versions of macOS, Windows, etc are in a state of flux right now.

Sly said:

You'll probqably want to avoid formatting your Time Machine drive as APFS

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Absolutely. Do NOT format your Time Machine as APFS - read this:

https://www.macworld.com/article/32...hine-drive-using-apfs-and-thats-not-good.html


Ian

Thanks Ian. I saw that article last night. I was loooking to see if I coould fine one which specifically vreferenced Mojave just in case it had changed something.

Slydude said:

Thanks Ian. I saw that article last night. I was loooking to see if I coould fine one which specifically vreferenced Mojave just in case it had changed something.

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The Macworld article states specifically if you encrypt (FileVault) your Time Machine backup drive using the Finder in High Sierra it will then convert the drive to APFS. No encryption, no conversion.

You're right Charlie. I read that when I glanced through the article but wasn't thinking about the implications of what it meant.