Should I wait for Yosemite or load Mavericks, running Mountain Lion now.

[Grateful11]

Just curious. Is Yosemite going to be vastly different from Mavericks or will Mavericks sorta prep me
for Yosemite? Would only be putting it on my MBA for now as a trial.

I'm also thinking of bumping up my mid-2010 Quad core i5 iMac to at least Mountain Lion as it's still running
10.6 but I'm starting to miss things like iMessage and Alerts as I seem to be working from it more and more lately.

[Chakravartin]

If you were running Lion, I'd say hit Mavericks now.

Mountain Lion... might as well wait.

[Grateful11]

Thanks, sounds good.

[Ken Sp.]

Upgrading from 10.6 will break a lots of old PowerPC apps. Make sure nothing mission-critical is going to get broken in this upgrade. That being said, whether you upgrade to 10.7 or 10.10, it makes no difference, the break comes from 10.6 to 10.7 or later.

You can check here what applications get broken going to 10.7,10.8, or 10.9.
http://roaringapps.com

Make sure you have a back up, and better yet, if you have a bootable backup of 10.6, then you are safe.

[Chakravartin]

Oh, yeah...

On the subject of the iMac...

That Mac should have plenty of CPU/GPU for the OS upgrade.

Do you have any PPC apps that you rely upon? If not...

If it's got 8GB of RAM or more then I'd take it to 10.8.5 or 10.9. Apple tends to "forget" to do thorough testing on migrations/upgrades from older OSs, so jumping that Mac straight to Yosemite is likely to be pretty rough... and in a year or two there may be some worthwhile software that requires Yosemite, so you'll save yourself some pain by getting mostly there now.

If it doesn't have at least 8GB RAM then I'd take it to 8GB and THEN do the upgrade.

Remember to toss the envelope indexes in Mail after moving to Mavericks. And poke through the System Pref's and Finder pref's before you erupt into rage ove the GUI. Most of it can be changed to look and feel like a legit Mac OS again.

And do a SMART check on the hard drive. It's just old enough that it's in prime territory for catastrophic drive failure.

[Grateful11]

That's true, I almost forgot about that. I have about 50 Christmas Card Envelopes that I send out every year and
they were done with AppleWorks years ago. On the Cards I just change the front scene and the message inside.
I have them backed up so I could always run them my old G5 dual or my C2D White MacBook. I'll check to see
if there's anything else that might get the axe. Thanks.

[Grateful11]

It's got 8GB's of RAM. So I should be ok, it's still very snappy. Been thinking of bumping it to 16GB's.

The 1Tb HD was replaced last year under Apple's replacement program but I'll definitely check it.

I definitely don't need Mail search problems, I use it a lot. Thanks.

[Rolando]

Agree with Ken, If you are happy with X.6x, stay with it. I don't see any benefit of Moving on to anything but Mavericks. Lion and Mtn Lion did nothing for me. If my MacBook could run Snow Leopard, I probably would!

I have read about some Snow Leopard users running Mavericks in a virtual machine. I still would pay about $50 to buy and use Rosetta!

[Black]

Maverick's memory management is improved such that you will probably never need more than 8 if you've been getting by on that.
My 2012 Mini is getting by fine on 4.

It probably goes without saying that you want a solid backup of your current drive before upgrading so you can "go back" if necessary.

I agree that Mavericks would be good now if Yosemite is the ultimate plan.

[Chakravartin]

Black wrote:
Maverick's memory management is improved such that you will probably never need more than 8 if you've been getting by on that.
My 2012 Mini is getting by fine on 4.

Keep in mind that this came from someone who enjoys booting off of USB 2.0 vs the internal SATA bus and thinks that it's magically faster that way.

Memory compression in Mavericks will slow an old Mac to a crawl if it's the slightest bit short on RAM. The 2012s and later seem to cope with it much better, but a 2010 will start feeling its age in a hurry if you don't have 8GB of RAM or more.