We hope that our tests will answer some questions about a Mac’s battery life “journey” though the many iterations of OS X over the past few years. In an effort to provide a comprehensive look at battery life, we decided to take one of our test Macs back to Snow Leopard and test each build of OS X from 10.6.8 all the way to the current build of Mountain Lion on both an SSD and an HDD. Other readers wanted to know if there would be a significant difference in battery life if the tests were run on a solid state system drive (SSD) versus a traditional hard disk system drive (HDD). In response to our reports, we received many questions and suggestions for further testing, with some readers telling us that they experienced a similar loss in battery life after the upgrade from 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.7 Lion. We were able to demonstrate that the upgrade to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion caused a significant reduction in battery life and that Mountain Lion’s first update, 10.8.1, only partially restored the lost running time.

Last month we performed a series of battery life tests on three Mac laptops: a 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro, 2012 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and a 2011 13-inch MacBook Air. We have put those builds through the same test and the results can be found here. You can do a good amount of disk cleanup on your own, and there are some excellent programs (both free and commercial) which can help you with those tasks.Update: The final builds of 10.8.2 and 10.7.5 were released by Apple on September 19.

(You are making backups to an external device, right?)įinally, when you begin this process, you might want to do as much disk cleanup/maintenance as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to use SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable backup.

But upgrading might not be as 'safe' or 'OK' as doing a clean, fresh installation of the new OS, and then migrating/copying needed files, folders, settings etc. Maybe skip 2 of them and upgrade to Yosemite. I would advise not skipping 'too many' of the various versions. Third, you need to be concerned about any third party software you are using, and most likely, will need either to upgrade some/most/all of them to be compatible with the OS you want to move to, or possibly some of them might not work at all.įourth, for High Sierra, Apple introduced the APFS file system, so that could be a challenge. Secondly, there are 6 more recent versions you could install: First off, you are running OS 10.7.5, which is Lion.

Upgrade mac os x 10.6 8 to 10.7