OS upgrade - 10.7.5 to something higher

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I have an older iMac from 2011 --> Intel Core i5, 2.5 GHz - running OS 10.7.5. I'd love to go to Mojave, but am told that the CPU is too old. Is this correct? If so, how can I obtain a 'higher' OS, say 10.12.x? Apple tells me that they don't have older versions of the OS available. Any advice would be appreciated.
 

chscag

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Your 2011 iMac can be upgraded to High Sierra (10.13.6) which should be available to you from the Mac App Store. Have you tried to upgrade from the Mac App Store?
 
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Thanks for the reply. I went to Software Update which took me to the App Store which could not find High Sierra 10.13.6. (searched as 'macos high sierra') It came back saying "Your search had no results".
 
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Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm trying to go from Lion (OS 10.7.5), ideally to Mojave (10.14). The suggestions offered here all need to rely on the previous OS version. I will therefore try to go from Lion through the versions, if I can find them, to something better than what I currently have. Thanks again and if there are further problems, this list is extremely helpful. :)
 

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A 2011 will not run Mojave. It will refuse to even download. The latest Mac OS you can install is High Sierra. the URL above is where you can download it.

BTW, it has nothing to do with the CPU. It's the GPU not supporting Metal that does not allow Mojave.
 
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Your iMac, from 2011, cannot go to Mojave. It has to be a 2012 or later model for that. But you could go to High Sierra. I don't think you need all of the versions in between to jump from Lion to HS. You can move to 10.8 and from there directly to HS. Make a backup before you start, and test it. I would personally recommend a clean install, formatting the drive and erasing everything, then installing HS, and as soon as it asks you if you want to migrate, take that opportunity, point Migration Assistant to the backup and let it run. At the end you will find that your account is created exactly as it was, with all your data moved and those applications that work with HS installed for you. You may need to re-register some software, particularly Adobe and Microsoft products. Here is Apple's reference: https://support.apple.com/macos/high-sierra I couldn't find a good reference for how to get to ML (10.8), sorry. However, you might try downloading the HS installer and making a bootable USB Thumb drive with DiskmakerX What is DiskMaker X ? and then just jumping straight from that bootable thumb drive to HS.
 

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There is a method for installing Mojave on somme unsupported Macs. I tried it recently and faileed the first time (maybe I didn't follow the directions correctly). I've successfully gotten Mojave running on a 2008 Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.

It's been on there since last weekend but I haven't had time to see how well the machine performs with it on there. I'll start a new thread with the procedure in case anyone interested.
 

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Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm trying to go from Lion (OS 10.7.5), ideally to Mojave (10.14).

You can not run Mojave on that machine which is why in my original reply to you (post #2) I said High Sierra. There are work arounds that allow installing Mojave on that machine but I do not recommend you go that route.
 

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There is a method for installing Mojave on somme unsupported Macs. I tried it recently and faileed the first time (maybe I didn't follow the directions correctly). I've successfully gotten Mojave running on a 2008 Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.

I read a few times on this forum that moving to Mojave with a standard rotational hard drive is not a great idea anyway because of the new file system Apple introduced.
I'm thinking of stopping at HS even though all my Macs are 2012 or later versions.
 

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I read a few times on this forum that moving to Mojave with a standard rotational hard drive is not a great idea anyway because of the new file system Apple introduced.
I'm thinking of stopping at HS even though all my Macs are 2012 or later versions.

I don't buy that. High Sierra added APFS support for SSDs, and Mojave extended that to Fusion drive and spinning drives. It makes ABSOLUTELY no difference what the actual media is for APFS. It will just work like it always has.
 
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krs


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Ashwin, you may want to read this article before saying the media makes no difference: https://blog.macsales.com/43043-using-apfs-on-hdds-and-why-you-might-not-want-to

From the article, using APFS on a rotational drive is going to lead to a lot of head movements and fragmentation.

Thanks for the link to the article.
Very clearly written and easy to understand.

However, as to the conclusion:
Now imagine what will happen when your Mac goes to read a file with a thousand or more extents on an HDD. As the file system reaches the end of one extent and starts reading from the next one, it has to wait the 4–10 msec for the disk’s platter and head to get aligned correctly to begin reading the next extent. Multiply this delay by 1,000 or more and the time taken to read these files could become unbearably long.

This long delay when reading large files is the reason I don’t recommend using APFS on HDDs.

I would be more concerned about the vastly increased number of read/write cycles by the hard drive and its effect on the HD life.

One thing I'm not clear on - if I upgrade an existing Mac to High Sierra, ie do a clean install, would the file system be automatically change to APFS?
I thought that only happens when moving to Mojave.
 
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dtravis7


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Thanks for the link to the article.
Very clearly written and easy to understand.

However, as to the conclusion:


I would be more concerned about the vastly increased number of read/write cycles by the hard drive and its effect on the HD life.

One thing I'm not clear on - if I upgrade an existing Mac to High Sierra, ie do a clean install, would the file system be automatically change to APFS?
I thought that only happens when moving to Mojave.

High Sierra only does APFS automatically with SSD's. I believe there is a way to not do APFS with an SSD. I will check later and report back. It's Mojave that automatically uses APFS with any drive.
 
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Thanks for the link to the article.
Very clearly written and easy to understand.

However, as to the conclusion:


I would be more concerned about the vastly increased number of read/write cycles by the hard drive and its effect on the HD life.

...CLIP.
Both are concerns. The one cited by the article relates to performance when reading/writing the drive. As it gets more and more fragmented as files are edited reading and writing will slow to a crawl. That impact is going to be pretty obvious and annoying pretty quickly. Your concern about wear, would apply to the head motors. Again, as fragmentation gets extreme, the heads have to move back and forth from the directory to the data, back to the directory, back to the data, etc. So the number and rate of head moves will increase over time. The disks themselves won't see much difference, as they aren't really impacted by the fragmentation of the data written to them. Head motors are linear motors and rarely fail. Normally drives fail because the associated electronics have some sort of component decay rather than a hardware failure of the drive disks or heads.
 

chscag

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At least with a spinning hard drive, you can defragment it and return it to a somewhat normal performance. Some older versions of iDefrag are free for download including license keys. The app is no longer being developed, however.

By the way, the downloads are legal as they are from the developer.
 
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Charlie, you could defrag if iDefrag supports APFS. Does it?
 

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The short answer is no. If you are running a HDD or fusion drive your filing system will remain HFS+ and the installation will be optimized for HFS+. If you are running An SSD (flash drive) it will be automatically converted to APFS.
 

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