I’ve got a 2012 15" Retina MBP. It’s been pretty rock solid although lately, the battery goes fairly quickly. Not a huge problem since I’m usually near an outlet.
I’m still on El Capitan (take that power users!). The reason why I never upgraded was because I had at least one piece of software that would be incompatible. And even before El Cap, I felt like I was not taking advantage of new OS features. Honestly, I don’t even know what new features I would be getting once I upgrade to High Sierra or Mojave.
But I’m really interested in upgrading to Omnifocus 3 because I feel I would benefit greatly with tags. I also would love to be able to use Drafts (beta) mainly for synching purposes from my iPhone.
Once I finalize my taxes, I can upgrade. So, I have a few questions:
a) I know it’s rumored that Drafts for Mac will need Mojave so it seems I should just upgrade to that instead of High Sierra.
b) Is there a definitive answer of if the ScanSnap iX500 will work under Mojave? I still use the scanner but not much at all these days. I don’t even have it at my house so although it would stink, it’s not a deal breaker.
c) I create a bootable clone using Super Duper (every week). If anything should go wrong in the upgrade, is it simple to just restore from the Super Duper clone? I’ve never had to do that previously.
Like you, I use a 2012 15" Retina MBP and could not be happier with the results of upgrading from 10.12/Sierra to 10.14/Mojave. My battery was draining quickly too, but had Apple replace it last month for $199US+tax and enjoy the more than 2 hours of runtime I previously had under battery alone.
I historically have waited until x.3 or x.4 releases before upgrading my OS - that kept me on Snow Leopard almost until 10.7 Lion came out. But with Apple’s change to open betas (which catch a lot more bugs, faster) I changed too; I upgraded to Mojave within a week of its release and have been very satisfied.
I’ve always cloned my macs, and then dove straight into the new OS. And I can’t remember the last time that went wrong, though I’m sure I’ve been extremely lucky.
In this case: as Mojave is very stable (or for me it is) I’d suggest moving to Mojave instead of High Sierra.
Just make sure that if your mac has an ssd you pre-format it to APFS, and don’t let the OS convert it.
Thanks for the info. Out of curiosity, how much more time are you getting with the new battery? I imagined a new battery would be more expensive but that is tolerable.
Thanks. Does this mean that after I clone the hard drive, I have to reformat the internal drive to APFS in Disk Utility, upgrade to Mojave and then restore from the clone?
The battery lasts for 5-6 hours under normal usage now. I have gone both longer and shorter depending on the tasks at hand.
I made a backup of my data via Time Machine and then did a clean install of Mojave. I allowed the installer to change the SSD to APFS. Then restored the Time Machine backup. No problems whatsoever. Having a cloned backup is a great idea too! Most of the customers I have helped with APFS formatting issues had pre-existing problems already.
A big part of me is to do the path of least resistance. After having a clone, just go to the App Store and upgrade to Mojave. Is this really a bad idea?
I may just do that and see how it goes for a month or so. It will also make me think hard about how my computer is setup. I’m fairly organized but I should do some more before making this upgrade.
If your system can run it, I think you should, if only for the more robust APFS file system and improvements to Safari. (On modern browsers I couldn’t live without changing the default zoom setting on site-by-site basis, and that only arrived on Safari in High Sierra.) Notes is nicely updated, with pinned notes among other niceties. Also, High Sierra added Messages on macOS synced with iOS. Most of the time when I’m at my desk I’m messaging on my Mac, and people are generally amazed at the speed and volume of my replies, lol.
It’s been mentioned as a plausible cause for issues on the Mac Geek Gab for months, easily solved by not having the installer upgrade your drive to apfs but doing it yourself prior to install.
One example, but there are more in de MGG archives covering the topic: