Upgrading A Mac System, part 4: Peripheral Hardware

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

In part 3 of this article series, I described my application migration story. In this part, I'm (finally) finishing up the tale by talking about my various pieces of hardware that either worked or needed to be replaced. All of the work I'm describing here was actually done in October and November, but I'm just getting around to writing about it now.

Ideally, I would like to just swap the computer and leave everything else unchanged. But life is not ideal. Over the years, Apple has changed the port configuration of the Mac mini, so not everything can just plug in. At least not without some adapters. And some devices that were perfectly great 9 years ago are old and slow by today's standards. So it's time to change up several peripherals.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 3: Apps

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

In part 2 of this article series, I described the migration process to move all my stuff to the new computer. In this article, I want to share my experiences with application support. What just worked, what didn't work and what was easy and hard to make work.

As you probably know, the latest versions of macOS, starting from version 10.15 (Catalina), do not support 32-bit applications. No 32-bit application will work unless you run it on an older version of macOS (e.g. via a virtual machine). Apple has supported 64-bit applications for a very long time, and they have always been supported on Intel processors. Nevertheless, quite a lot of Mac apps in my possession were 32-bit. I'm not sure why, since 64-bit compilers were available on the Intel Mac platform since day-one.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 2: Migration

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

In part 1 of this article series, I explained why I needed to upgrade my old Mac, what I bought, and the shipping process.

Now that the computer had arrived, the next step was to move all of my data from the old computer to the new one. In the past, I did this the hard way - I manually created user accounts (an administrator, my personal account, and accounts for my wife and daughter). I then copied all of our documents over the LAN, manually installed all the software I require, ending up with a working system. The whole process usually takes a week or two, plus all the time needed to configure my preferences in everything.

This time, I decided to use Apple's Migration Assistant utility to speed up the process. This, as it turns out, was a mixed bag. Some parts of the migration worked flawlessly, and other parts made a mess I had to clean up after.

Upgrading A Mac System, part 1: Hardware Purchase

Photo credit: Derorgmas
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Upgrading A Mac System series:

• Part 1: Hardware Purchase
• Part 2: Migration
• Part 3: Apps
• Part 4: Peripheral Hardware

For the past 9 years, I have been using the same computer for my main home system, a Mid-2011 Mac mini server. Equipped with two 750 GB hard drives and 16 GB of RAM (upgraded from its original 4GB), it has served me very well. Originally shipped with macOS version 10.7 ("Lion"), it has been upgraded several times through macOS 10.12 ("Sierra"). Although still working great today, it has become increasingly obvious that it needs to be replaced.

The main reason is that its system software is no longer supported by Apple. Although I could theoretically get a bit more support by upgrading to macOS 10.13 ("High Sierra"), that's still an old version and it has many known problems that I don't want to have to deal with. More recent versions of macOS are not compatible with this hardware and therefore can't be installed.

Another bigger problem is that some of my applications can't be upgraded. In particular, Microsoft Office dropped support for macOS 10.12. In order to get any new updates, including security updates, I need to move on to a newer version of macOS.

Finally, it's a bit slow. Modern versions of macOS make heavy use of the file system and a SATA hard drive, no matter how well it performs, just can't keep up these days. An SSD is really required for good performance. I could replace the hard drives with SSDs, of course, but that wouldn't solve the other two problems, so it became time to shop for a new Mac.

Giving an old Mac a new lease on life

Update: August 24, 2017: Added section about enabling TRIM

This weekend, I upgraded my daughter's 2011 MacBook Air with a new SSD and battery and gave it a new lease on life. Although this computer is six years old, it still has no problem handling all the tasks she uses it for: web surfing, photos, Microsoft Office, music, YouTube and other related tasks. But after all this time, the 120G SSD is getting full and the battery only lasts about an hour on a full charge. The computer was also running a pretty old version of macOS - 10.7 ("Lion") was released in 2011 and hasn't seen an update since 2012. Because of this, several other key applications, including Firefox and Chrome were also old and out of date, and were in need of upgrades.