Snow Leopard to Mavericks

[havenrich]

I want to upgrade my iMac to Mavericks but only Yosemite is offered. How can I get Mavericks?

 

[chscag]

If you're currently running Snow Leopard and have never upgraded to Mavericks before, then Mavericks is not available to you. You can only upgrade to Yosemite. However, you can still purchase Lion or Mountain Lion from the Apple on line store.

 

[Maxtcc]

Havenrich
you need to upgrade each step of the OS in sequence to get to the latest version.
that is you will need Lion to get to mountain lion to then get mavericks and then Yosemite.
Luckily the last two are free upgrades. This is all provided that your machine is able to run each stage of the upgrade process.
I hope this helps you.

 

[pigoo3]

you need to upgrade each step of the OS in sequence to get to the latest version.
that is you will need Lion to get to mountain lion to then get mavericks and then Yosemite.

Sorry…not true.

- Nick

 

[harryb2448]

havenrich, depending on the precise model of your iMac which you have not supplied, you upgrade from Snow Leopard directly to Yosemite. Next consideration is memory and most here recommend 8GB as a minimum.

 

[havenrich]

You mean RAM? That would be 2 GB(1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM) I believe. I have 34 GB free on the 320 GB hard drive.
I don't think I meet the necessary requirements for Yosemite and would be happy with Mavericks. Mostly I'm wanting to use the latest version of Safari and manage my picture collection with iPhoto and iPhoto Manager.
I should have done this when it as available for $20!?

 

[harryb2448]

No. memory is the amunt installed, and 2GB is simply not enough.

Your next problem is with only 34GB free on your hard drive, you should be having slow down, beach balls etc. Most recommend a minimum of 20% free space for a hard drive to work anywhere near efficiently so you have a lot of clering out of old files to do, or remove iTunes, Photos etc to an external drive.

Yosemite is free so that is even cheaper than $20.00.

You still need to provide the model of your iMac so we can ascertain if Yosemite will actually run on the machine. As a rule of thumb 2008 models will run Yosemite, early models no.

 

[havenrich]

Mac Specs: iMac "Core 2 Duo" 2.66 GHz (E8135) 20-inch (early 2009) Model # A1224(EMC 2266) Model ID iMac9,1

It would appear that I must add RAM. I see where I can buy 8GB(2 4GB boards) for ~$100 and install it/them myself in the bottom slots of my machine. I have an external 1.5 TB hard drive which can hold a bootable clone of my iMac in its own partition as well as transferred files to make more room on the iMac's hard drive to get to the 20% recommended minimum.

This would allow me to have Yosemite even though I don't need or necessarily want all the new "bells and whistles" which the marketers have foisted upon us. The basic question is should I just get Mountain Lion as it would be "supported" and I only have an iPhone 4s and that might synch properly with OS X v10.8?

 

[Slydude]

The 4s should synch fine under Mountain Lion. Until recently I was using an iPhone 4 and it synched fine under 10.8 if I remember correctly.

 

[harryb2448]

Go with Sly's advice havenrich. I seem to be the only person in the Southern Hemisphere that does not own either an iPhone or SmartPhone so can't comment!

 

[chscag]

Go with Sly's advice havenrich. I seem to be the only person in the Southern Hemisphere that does not own either an iPhone or SmartPhone so can't comment!

Now what kind of a deal is that Harry? As a major Apple stockholder I would expect you to have the latest iPhone 6+ with 128 GB of storage. I'm not even a stockholder and I have all sorts of "Apples".

 

[Slydude]

Now what kind of a deal is that Harry? As a major Apple stockholder I would expect you to have the latest iPhone 6+ with 128 GB of storage. I'm not even a stockholder and I have all sorts of "Apples".

I forgot about Harry being a stockholder. If I could have gotten him to provide a small subsidy I could have sprung for a higher storage capacity 6S.

 

[harryb2448]

My only excuse, after a long thought, is i purchased my stock before the iPhone, iPad, iPod etc were invented. Thus I don't have them lol! Have lived too long in rural areas of Australia where mobile reception was non existent or poor.

 

[toMACsh]

It's kind of the modern equivalent of being "off the wagon". Everybody else does it... But Mom always asked, "If everybody else was jumping off a cliff, would you do that too?"