For those of you wondering if the latest MacOS Catalina can work on older equipment, my experience is that it can.

I just swapped 16 GB RAM and a new 2 TB SSD from one MacBook Pro (mid 2011, not suited for Catalina) to this one. No issues.

I put the 8 GB RAM and the 240 GB SSD back into the mid-2011 MacBook Pro and it works as it did.

I like that these vintage products have screws and covers and user-accessible features. And, I don't have to spend $1300 on a new laptop!

It was a nice Sunday afternoon effort.

Good to know! Thank you, 4MUL8R.

(Typed on a mid-2012 MacBook Pro....)

After being tired my 2011 MacAir running El Capitan would not sync Safari bookmarks, I finally made the dive ... and upgraded to the highest it would go, High Sierra. So the minty 13" 2011 will not open Pages docs created on the beat-up 11" Air running Catalina. But I did discover that there IS a way to "go backward" in the OS, despite being told several times that there was not a way to do it. So I can wipe the 11" and start up from High Sierra ...

But that is enough modernization for now. Syncing works.

vthoky, according to this apple support page, your laptop will run on Catalina. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201475

Thank you, Woodman, for verifying.
I'm downloading the update now.

quote:

Originally posted by Woodman:

After being tired my 2011 MacAir running El Capitan would not sync Safari bookmarks, I finally made the dive ... and upgraded to the highest it would go, High Sierra.

High Sierra is as far as mine will go, too.

I am still using El Capitan.

How is High Sierra working out for you, as opposed to El Capitan? Is it a worth-while upgrade?

I'm running High Sierra, no problems here.

Just ordered today a new MacBook Air to replace the MacBook I’ve been using which fell and broke the screen. Decent storage and fast enough for what I do, and not priced too bad for an Apple. Plus they supposedly fixed the previous bad keyboard. And hopefully I should be good on updates for a while.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-...mac--slid---product-

Argh. I've attempted the upgrade.

When pointed to the SSD, the system tells me "This volume is not formatted as APFS."

I'm not sure what to do now, aside from ignore it and keep the existing OS.

If you have the Time Machine backup, you are still OK VTHoky.

If you go to the App Store, you should find Catalina there if your machine will run it.

If your machine is terribly hosed up, you can always do a full drive reinstall from the internet. Search for the instructions on how to start using the combination keystrokes for a full OS refresh. This takes a bit of time, but then you can restore the newly formatted drive from your Time Machine backup.

quote:

Originally posted by ridewv:
Just ordered today a new MacBook Air to replace the MacBook I’ve been using which fell and broke the screen. Decent storage and fast enough for what I do, and not priced too bad for an Apple. Plus they supposedly fixed the previous bad keyboard. And hopefully I should be good on updates for a while.
https://www.apple.com/macbook-...mac--slid---product-

I have an i5 on the way. 10th gen intel with a fixed keyboard? I’m in. It’ll will be especially awesome if the fan is actually connected to the heatsink this time.

That being said, there is nothing quite like juicing up old MacBook pros with SSDs and ram and then seeing how well they perform. Thanks for the post OP. I’ll bet it was a lot of fun.

No issues with hardware cutoff/retirement? I forgot what year they cut off with Catalina.

I had a 2009 model that was running like a top on everything that came out, until it got smashed by a taxi driver in Liege.

Macs soldier on, and last a long, long time compared to any PC I ever owned.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
How is High Sierra working out for you, as opposed to El Capitan? Is it a worth-while upgrade?

Yes, my 2011 Air Safari bookmarks sync automatically now with an iPhone SE and a newer 11” Air. Before, zero sync on the older one. I’ve added some gmail accounts to Mail and did not have any porting issues.

V, you’ll have to tinker with it to get it to work. There is always a fix, a procedure.

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
Argh. I've attempted the upgrade.

When pointed to the SSD, the system tells me "This volume is not formatted as APFS."

Are you running Mojave? There seems to be an issue.

This is only the first discussion link I followed:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250712626

_{at least I can tell you what NOT to do. I'm just finishing restoring my MacBook from a backup (I use TimeMachine with WDMyCloud) because I followed what was meant to be "a safe option" to convert into APFS. I run my computer in Recovery Mode, unmounted primary drive, converted the filesystem into APFS and it worked. The filesystem is now APFS but I had to either reinstall the system or restore it from backup, which I did. After almost 4h my computer will be like new}

If I was not having interactivity issues, I'd leave it alone. I only upgraded because my "upstairs" 13" Mac would not sync bookmarks with my phone and "downstairs" 11" Mac.

But the 13" is in far better condition. The keyboard is virtually mint, as my ex- used the laptop for window shopping, where-as the 11" was used to write 5 years of blog. So I may get funky and wipe the 11", then install an older OS BECAUSE Pages and Numbers via Catalina will not open in High Sierra AND I do not feel like accessing documents "in the cloud". The other benefit of ditching Catalina is that I prefer the way Mail views, with multiple columns from which to sort my content.

If I had known my Mail view would lose interactivity, I would have skipped it.

V-Tail, because High Sierra is now syncing bookmarks with my iPhone, I'm assuming a downgrade in OS will still allow the three devices to sync together. I'll test it out before wiping the 11".

quote:

Originally posted by Woodman:

V-Tail, because High Sierra is now syncing bookmarks with my iPhone, I'm assuming a downgrade in OS will still allow the three devices to sync together. I'll test it out before wiping the 11".

One of my concerns is the Reminders app, which I use for a lot of things.

If iPhone / iPad are on most current version of iOS, I think (not sure) that Reminders will not sync with any Mac OS that is older than Catalina.

If you want to upgrade one that is too old look up dosdude1. I have a MacBook Pro that is too old to run it but I recently updated it using his patcher. So far I love it. Do not try it unless you have it upgraded with a minimum of an SSD.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
If iPhone / iPad are on most current version of iOS, I think (not sure) that Reminders will not sync with any Mac OS that is older than Catalina.

Notes is the application I use all the time. It syncs through iCloud. I do not remember if it was working properly with the latest iPhone OS and the 11" on ElCap. But what pissed me off was the Safari bookmarks not syncing.

So I upgraded the 11" OS from ElCap to Catalina, and Safari bookmarks then sync'd back and forth no problem.

Eventually I wanted to begin using an even older laptop, the 13", but again Safari bookmarks were not sync'd. And I could not upgrade to Catalina because of its age. But I got it to High Sierra. And now bookmarks sync.

So one of the devices has an older OS and two of them have newer OS's, and they all sync. I just checked, deleting a bookmark on the 13" w/ High Sierra, and the iPhone Safari application immediately responded.

The only reason I'd go backward in OS on the 11", away from Cat, is so that Pages and Numbers files would open, read, and modify across both laptops.

quote:

Originally posted by Woodman:

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:
Argh. I've attempted the upgrade.

When pointed to the SSD, the system tells me "This volume is not formatted as APFS."

Are you running Mojave? There seems to be an issue.

This is only the first discussion link I followed:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250712626

_{at least I can tell you what NOT to do. I'm just finishing restoring my MacBook from a backup (I use TimeMachine with WDMyCloud) because I followed what was meant to be "a safe option" to convert into APFS. I run my computer in Recovery Mode, unmounted primary drive, converted the filesystem into APFS and it worked. The filesystem is now APFS but I had to either reinstall the system or restore it from backup, which I did. After almost 4h my computer will be like new}

I am on Mojave, currently. Here's the message I got:


I'm not currently having any difficulties, and I know absolutely Jack about APFS. I may be content to leave it alone, I think....

Thanks to the help and guidance of VT Hokey, I re-purposed 2 older MB Pros (2010/2012)
They are running High Sierra. That's good enough for my needs.
The older one has all my stuff on it as a Back-up and is always in the "Off" mode
The 2012, my daughter is using it and runs Photoshop on it, No issues and faster than when purchased.

quote:

Originally posted by vthoky:

I'm not currently having any difficulties, and I know absolutely Jack about APFS. I may be content to leave it alone, I think....

Yeah, I was pretty much in the dark when I upgraded the OS on my phone to one I did not like as much (more features than I need). Then upgraded the laptop to the newest OS because I thought I had to. But discovered later there was a way to do an incremental upgrade.

Live and learn. Mojave is pretty new. My MIL has that on hers.

quote:

Originally posted by downtownv:
Thanks to the help and guidance of VTHoky, I re-purposed 2 older MB Pros (2010/2012) ...

Glad I could help you, downtownv!