Love Your Mac
Inspiring ideas for revamping old Apple kit
Last month, I shaved a few minutes off the startup time of my Mac mini with some aggressive de-cluttering. This month, I’m going to try speeding up my wife’s MacBook. Alison is making do with an 11-inch, Late 2010 MacBook Air. She almost exclusively uses it for FaceBook, email, shopping and Skype, so it doesn’t need blistering performance. And since it has an SSD, it already boots up acceptably fast. But lately, Alison has complained that it feels more sluggish, and she blames the incremental bloat that comes with each OS upgrade. She’s currently running OS X 10.10.6 El Capitan and refuses to risk any more slowdown by upgrading to Sierra. Now, I generally believe the latest version is always the best, but rather than argue from an ideological standpoint, I’m going to approach this empirically. Let’s reinstall a few previous versions of OS X and see if it improves performance. And if it does, which version offers the best compromise between speed and features? Was there ever a perfect version, or is this just nostalgia?