I don’t know exactly how long because I went out with Ice the Dog for his usual one-hour afternoon walk, and when we returned home the update was finished. It took ages to download OS X 10.11 from iTunes (I read that it’s more than 6GBs), but the update itself was surprisingly fast. I did the usual maintenance like run Disk Utility first. I back up using Time Machine, but I’ve never tried to restore anything from it. You must be optimistic and think happy thoughts while you undertake this process.Īfter reading other reports of success by users who upgraded by several versions, I decided to bite the bullet and do it. Sunflowers ( girassóis in Portuguese) are the happiest flowers around. What’s this post got to do with sunflowers? I live in a Windows/Mac/Linux household, and the word upgrade evokes the same reaction for each operating system: back up everything and cross your fingers. In the past I’ve had problems with upgrades rendering software buggy or useless, and this is not specific to any operating system - it’s happened to me on Windows and Mac. I run a lot of software to process photos (including Nikon Capture NX2, Photo Mechanic, Lightroom 4, Adobe CS3/mostly Photoshop 10). I dragged this thing across the Atlantic from Toronto in its own suitcase and it’s now almost seven years old. I use a late 2009 model iMac with 12GBs of RAM. There are always new features to improve the way things work, security updates, usually an increase in overall speed and efficiency, and new applications are written for newer technology.

My browsers were all complaining because as of this year they are too old to be supported. At present there are about 40,000 emails in the database, and it was getting quite bogged down. For one thing, I knew it would probably make my mail program run faster. It’s not like I wasn’t looking forward to an upgrade, either. I mainly use the 12-year old PowerBook for writing articles and email these days in the kitchen, which is the coolest room in the apartment.

But it’s really slow (photo editing is impossible on it) and it’s run out of browsers that still work on Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) except Safari, which spits out messages from practically all websites reminding me that my software is grossly out of date. But I don’t really have the excuse that I would lose all productivity - I still have my 2004 PowerBook G4 which functions just fine.

I didn’t want to interrupt a big editing job, or I had to get a presentation done, or I was migrating my websites, or this or that. I kept postponing the upgrade, because it never seems to be a good time to upgrade. Then El Capitan was released in 2015, also free (thanks Apple), and I waited for the usual bugs to get reported and fixed.

Mac os x 10.6 upgrade