I love my MacBook - really love it! While it is a 2011 model, I have beefed it up with 16Gb of RAM and a 512Gb SSD. The computer is pretty much all I could want and I use it all day, every day! It is my work and home computer, goes with me everywhere and sees a huge amount of use.
So, when Yosemite appeared as a free update, I thought to myself, what the heck, nothing like a new operating system overhaul to make my awesome machine even awesomer! It actually downloaded in a few hours and for the first time ever, I just upgraded my existing machine instead of doing a rebuild from scratch.
The first few days, Yosemite was pretty and new but sluggish...and then my awesome Mac started misbehaving. It was slow...my Mac is never slow but now it was. I headed off to the forums figuring that there must be a fix out there. Below is the list of things I found, tried, etc....
1. Chrome is horribly buggy on Yosemite and loads lots of processes that then hang with the effect of driving with the parking brake on. Ok, I thought, they will fix that soon and I switched to Firefox. I have to say that Firefox has come leaps and bounds and I actually really like it as a browser (typing in it right now!)
Mac was still slow....
2. I found that the older models that have the switching graphics cards seem to have some issues. I disabled the fancy transparency features and then disabled the graphics switching.
Mac wasn't quite as slow now and then an update came out. I installed the update with excitement that it would clear all my woes but then there developed a popping sound in the speaker. Very annoying...
3. I tried all kinds of things here - SMC and PRAM reset would clear it for a while, reboot would clear it briefly, a terminal command to kill all audio processes did not seem to have any affect.
In the meantime, I started noticing display issues. Background windows would pixelate, just clearing up when you clicked on the window.
4. I decided that my woes were my own doing (surely Apple would not dump a faulty operating system on us!) and rebuilt the whole machine from scratch. I just knew that would fix it. Wiped the hard drive, downloaded and created a usb installer and off I went. It was going to be GREAT!
Hmm, every problem was still there but now they were actually worse. The sound would randomly quit in my favorite video client forcing a reboot to fix. The display was pixelating like crazy and I couldn't go much more than an hour before the speaker would start popping at every possible chance it could. And, oh sooo slow.
I called Apple and talked them into honoring the warranty that had just expired on a new logic board that been installed a few months ago, thinking now it must be my computer.
Then, last night, I thought I would try one last thing. I wiped the hard drive and reinstalled Mavericks!!
I love my computer again. It is fast, it works, there are no sound or video glitches and the best part of all, I don't have to cuss at that stupid green button that Apple thought they would "fix" with Yosemite. I reinstalled Right Zoom and now my windows maximize as I want them to.
It is a sad day when I have to downgrade, it is the first time I have ever had to with Apple. Honestly, Apple, are trying to become Microsoft? It this your Windows 8 OS? I understand it might work well on newer machines but while mine is an older model, it has the same i7 processor as the newer ones and the same amount of RAM. It is not as though you are trying to make it compatible with every computer out there - it just has to work on Macs!
So, if you are on the fence and are on an older Mac, my advice is to wait...or maybe just skip this one altogether! Unless you just want to appreciate your Mac again...as I do now after the Yosemite climb!
