At this point, it may be worth considering the purchase of a newer machine. However machines like the MacBook Air cannot be upgraded as the memory is soldered to the logic board in order to keep the machine as small and light as possible. If you have a Mac with only 4GB of memory, if you’re lucky, you can simply upgrade the memory and install MacOS Sierra without further worry. While this is technically sufficient to run Sierra, it will do so very slowly, and may end up being slower than earlier versions of OS X due to Sierra’s increased usage of system resources. If you have a machine from 2010 onwards that supports the new MacOS, you may only have 4GB of memory. The models it does support, however, may not benefit from an upgrade. MacOS 10.12 breaks with tradition, finally dropping support for older models. On September 20th 2016, Apple released its latest operating system MacOS Sierra 10.12, dropping the ‘OS X’ moniker in favour of ‘MacOS’, bringing the naming scheme inline with the pre-existing tvOS and iOS.Īpple is heavily pushing its existing userbase to download MacOS Sierra, to the point of automatically downloading the installer in the background, even if your machine cannot support it.įrom OS X 10.8.5 to 10.11.6, the hardware requirements for the OS had remained unchanged.

Update to mac os 10.12