Rolling back the years
Did your Mac run faster on previous OS X?
1 Processor
1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The Late 2010 MacBook Air runs about a quarter the speed of a MacBook with an i7 chip.
2 2GB RAM
This is the base model. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, so you couldn’t upgrade after you purchased.
3 11.6-inch screen
The smaller screen size was a new option for the Late 2010 model. The screen resolution is 1366 x 768.
4 SSD
All MacBook Airs from 2010 onward use solid-state drives exclusively. This one has 128GB of storage.
5 Ports
The slim design leaves room for just one USB 2 port on each side, plus a MagSafe and Mini DisplayPort.
6 OS X
This Mac was originally sold with 10.7 Lion. It supports all versions from 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.11 Sierra.
Let’s start by benchmarking the
MacBook running El Capitan. For the kind of light duties my wife Alison demands of her laptop, a full benchmarking suite feels like overkill. But if I don’t measure the performance, I can’t compare it. I eventually decided to use Geekbench 4 (geekbench.com) because it claims to use tests that model real-world applications. It also has a free trial version. With no other apps running, the MacBook scores 992 using just one of the CPU cores and 1661 in multi-core tests. Next I made a bootable backup of the entire drive, using Super Duper! (shirtpocket. com). It was a condition of the deal I made with Alison that she would have her MacBook returned to her in its original condition. In view of this, I also uploaded her entire home folder to cloud storage as well, just to be sure.
Now to downgrade the OS. Although the App Store lists all the previous versions of OS X you have installed, under the Purchased tab, you can’t just re-download an old version. OS X will refuse to run the installer for an older version than you already have. Instead I used a spare USB hard drive, and formatted it as OS X Extended (Journaled) and partitioned using GUID. Then in Terminal, I typed: sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/ createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/ Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/ Install\ OS\ X\ Yosemite. app --nointeraction
This runs the createinstallmedia utility built into the installer for Yosemite, and tells it to install to the external drive instead of the MacBook’s own drive. It took about 20 minutes. Next, I restarted the MacBook with the Option key held down and picked ‘Install OS X Yosemite’ from the list of bootable drives. Once the menu bar appeared for the OS X Installer, I clicked Utilities > Disk Utility and erased the main hard drive. After I had
wiped both the drive, and the anxious sweat from my brow, I quit Disk Utility and returned to the installer to put a clean copy of Yosemite on the now empty drive.
Disappointing numbers
Now that Yosemite was up and running, I reinstalled GeekBench and took another sounding. The results were… underwhelming. Scores of 994 and 1666 were about a quarter of a percent faster than El Capitan. And this was a completely clean install. By the time I restored Alison’s apps and extensions, it would probably be slower than before. Time to roll back the clock again. I downloaded Mavericks, installed it to the external disk, wiped the MacBook’s internal drive and ran the installer. A hour later I ran GeekBench again. Mavericks scored 1013 and 1699 – about 2% faster than El Capitan. That’s slightly better but at this point, I figured that I might as well do one more, so I went through the whole rigmarole one more time to downgrade another step to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. This time I saw a performance jump of just under 5% compared with Mavericks, or 7% overall.
So after a long afternoon of installing and reinstalling, what did I have to show for it? 7% performance difference isn’t something you can actually notice. These are synthetic benchmark scores testing intensive numbercrunching and graphics processing tasks. When I tried opening apps and loading webpages, it all felt about the same. And this performance isn’t free either – it comes at the expense of the Maps and iBooks apps, cloud syncing in Notes, window snapping to put two apps side-by-side – to name just a few of the features I’ve definitely seen my wife use. Last month’s tactic of simply clearing out the junk I don’t need and never use had a bigger effect on performance on my Mac than dropping back three versions of OS X on Alison’s. It’s easy to get nostalgic about previous versions, much like we do about previous decades but I am now more convinced than ever that nostalgia is an illusion brought on by the longing for lost youth. And as soon as I have restored Alison’s MacBook to El Capitan, I’ll start nagging her to upgrade to Sierra.