New Life for an Old iMac Part 3
July 2020
A few months ago, I decided to breathe new life into an out of date 2008 iMac that my wife and I share. First, I installed CloudReady. A few weeks later, I installed macOS Catalina. Even though I stated that I was planning to continue running Catalina for the near future, I ended up going back to CloudReady much sooner than I anticipated. The main reason? Performance.
Once the initial novelty of running the latest version of macOS wore off, I found myself with a barely usable machine. Initially things were pretty good, and at the time that I wrote New Life for an Old iMac Part 2, macOS Catalina seemed to run better on our iMac than did OS X El Capitan, which was the last Apple supported OS version for the iMac 8,1.
Initially, I decided to only use Safari for the sake of simplicity and because it initially performed decently. However, I soon wanted to see how Chrome would perform on the iMac, as it is has become my browser of choice on all other platforms. Unfortunately, every time I tried to launching Chrome, it took a very long time to load, and it ate up most of the iMac’s RAM once it was up and running. Chrome was by all accounts unusable, and it was certainly not conducive to having more than one tab open before it would slow down.
Aside from Chrome’s lackluster performance, navigating macOS Catalina required the patience of a Buddhist monk. Opening the file manager took around 30 seconds. The same can be said for Settings, Mail, Reminders, Music, and most other apps. When clicking on the Launchpad icon in the doc, every application icon would render slowly — one by one (and this is with no other applications open). It got to the point where Safari was about the only application I was using, and to be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of the desktop version of Safari. I can now see why Apple decided not to officially release macOS Catalina for the iMac 8,1.
Back to CloudReady I went. On our now low end iMac, CloudReady runs circles around macOS Catalina and is clearly the better choice for performance. Chromium (browser) opens nearly instantly. I can have multiple tabs open. I can multitask. The only downside is that WiFi is a little slow. It is still perfectly usable for surfing the web, watching video and streaming music though. I can deal with that since the performance all around is so much better.