Apple MacOS Sierra: would you run it on a 2009 MacBook?
2009 feels like a million years ago, and might as well be, considering how far Macs have come since then. The 2009 MacBook was what some believed to be the last “MacBook”, as the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, respectively, became the North Pole and South Pole of Apple laptops. Come 2015, Apple fans begin to catch on a familiar drift, as the MacBook Air remains Retina-less, and a new 2015 MacBook Retina grabs the spotlight, in all its super-thin, fanless glory.
As it turns out, the MacBook is not the only heartstring Apple has been planning on plucking, as 2016 brings back the MacOS, sans the X, a sensible decision, and a further step towards Apple’s path to brand consolidation.
During Apple WWDC 2016’s keynote, Apple took an opportunity to offer a glimpse into MacOS Sierra’s list of compatible Macs. As expected, many older Macs did not make the cut, which includes any (“just”) MacBook, and iMac released prior to 2009, with worse news for any MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini and Mac Pro launched prior to 2010. Curiously, the 2009 MacBook, is about the oldest MacBook to make Sierra’s list.
Then and now
By 2009 standards, the MacBook was a Top Dog in a world of laptops still struggling to break free from mediocre performance, and horrible battery life.
The 2009 MacBook was a hot item... and we mean it: during regular benchmark testing performed by LaptopMag in 2009, the MacBook’s touchpad measured 82F, while the space between the G and H keys reached a sizzling 92 degrees. The MacBook ran on a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7550, the same which powered the MacBook Pro during that same year.
This was not the only reason why the MacBook ran so hot. Let’s remind ourselves that 2009 was still the year when the laptop computer was in a cocoon, waiting to hatch into today’s world of 9-hour battery desktop replacements. Back then, everything within a laptop functioned through moving parts, from the 250GB 5400 rpm HDD, to the fans doing the best job at cooling down the CPU as the laws of physics would allow, down to the optical drive, one of the last optical drives we’ll ever see on a Mac.
The body of the 2009 MacBook was made of white plastic, sporting a 13.3 inch LED backlit 1280x800 pixels non-Retina display.
Heat and friction have always been the drawback of laptops, including the MacBook, whose daily battery life was one of the longest for its time, measured at 5 hours, until fanless technology and the advent of Solid State Drives began to turn laptops into the quiet, shiny, paper-thin aluminum slates we take for granted today. Mind you, today’s 9-10 hours battery life is far from earning any laptop manufacturer the all-day battery life badge, but it’s certainly amazing to see what laptops can do, performance-wise, particularly MacBooks, due to how fine-tuned the operating system is in relation to its hardware.
It’s hard to say how well MacOS Sierra would run on a 2009 MacBook, granted the ability to find one in stock conditions, with that said, just as Mac OS X El Capitan, a lot of work has been put into Sierra’s ability to run efficiently, even on Macs as old as 2009.
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