Review: Apple OS X Yosemite – Part 1
Apple yesterday released OS X Yosemite to the world as a free upgrade. The question is this: Is it worth upgrading to? I’ll answer that in part 2 of this review. In this part of this review, I will cover the install of OS X Yosemite. It’s actually quite easy. First you have to make a backup in case bad things happen to you. If you don’t, good luck to you.
Then you have to make sure that your Mac is on this list. If it’s not, stop here.
- iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
- MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
- MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
- MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
- Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
- Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
- Xserve (Early 2009)
And you can upgrade directly from the following versions of OS X:
- OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6.8)
- OS X Lion (v10.7)
- OS X Mountain Lion (v10.8)
- OS X Mavericks (v10.9)
Now you simply go to the App Store, click download, enter the password for your Apple ID, and wait for 5.5 GB to download. Once it’s downloaded it will start the installer and after you agree to the license agreement and choose the drive that you want to install Yosemite on. Your Mac will do a couple of things and reboot. Then you get to watch a progress bar go across the screen and this is the first warning for you. The installer told me that I had 20 minutes remaining, but the actual install was closer to 40 minutes. At the end of that install it will reboot and you’ll see another progress bar go across the screen for six more minutes or so. When that’s done, you’ll have to agree to more stuff, sign in with your iCloud password (and if you have two factor authentication enabled, you’ll need to enter a validation code from the iDevice of your choice) and also set up iDrive if you so choose.
Done. Declare victory and have a beer. Almost. I then was prompted to update my copy of iWork and also update iTunes along with iLife. So I did so and thus far, almost everything seems to work fine. One exception that I found was WiFi. I couldn’t connect to the 5Ghz band of my router. I had to reboot it to solve the problem. The other exception was that iMovie HD which I have been hanging on to has finally stopped working. Yosemite refuses to run it. This doesn’t surprise me as I did say a while ago that I fully expected that an OS update from Apple would break iMove HD. Yesterday I was proven right on that front. I haven’t done any performance testing, but I will over the next day or so. I am still getting used to the iOS 8 like look of Yosemite. But I like it.
Part two will arrive on Saturday and I’ll cover the key features and what I think of them.
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