Q: Does Yosemite Improve or Reduce Performance?

Hi,

I have the Macbook Pro full specs and Yosemite and Adobe together they are horrible, it is a very good update as long as you are not a designer, I use photoshop continuously and it is a disaster super slow and lags big time, I even did a Yosemite clean install i thought that was the issue but same performance, even just to show and hide a layer I wait 2 seconds.

My suggestion is if you are a normal user update to Yosemite great features and the direction apple is taking is awesome, but if you are a designer stay away it will really really really slow you for now, hope they fix this ASAP have been over a month waiting for an update from Adobe or Apple.

I cannot believe it they did not test this when they know most designers work with Apple and we are all stuck here.

Overall, I think it's worth upgrading, if you either got sick of the 3D aqua UI or you need the new handoff/continuity functionality. Otherwise, if you don't want either, you don't really need the upgrade.

Some things are slower on Yosemite: booting and loading, shutting down, system responsivity is low for a few seconds after it loaded, sometimes you can notice some UI refresh lag when opening some Finder windows. Some sounds settings are not saved right after rebooting. For example, my sound balance always gets shifted to right, even though I fix it every time I load Yosemite. So, there are some small bugs here and there, but overall the system seems reliable.

On the bright side, Safari is faster and has a better interface. The UI is better, if you like 2D-styled interface. There are probably lots of other improvements for the stock apps Apple delivers (mail, chat, etc), but I don't use them, so I can't say much about them.

There are few tricks to improve speed of photoshop under Yosemite. I had similar problem with my mac pro 2013.

First disable rulers. Yes it's strange, just try disabling them.

Next step is to reset photoshop settings. There is one guide on adobe site and two ways to do it. One is to delete one file and other is to hold keyboard combination while starting up photoshop. This solved my problems with brush lag in newest photoshop 2014.2. good luck!

The complaints about Yosemite seem over stated and a  bit strident, because I'm running a 20" early 2009 iMac with 4MG RAM and having no problems with Yosemite that I didn't have with Mavericks.

True, it's my fault I can't afford new hardware, so I can't use Handoff or Airdrop, iCloud Drive is a disaster of lost files, slow performance and syncing problems , and and iPhoto has become a pit of despair, but those are not central to getting my work done. So I don't use them.

Also, I can't run the new version of Safari and Photoshop CC/Bridge at the same time without each becoming sluggish, and the Adobe stuff routinely crashing, but if  I keep an eye on it and only run one of those at a time there's no problem. And my Wacom tablet is working again and now only crashes a couple of times a day.

So, once I accepted that older machines like mine can't really handle a lot of things very well like upgraded Spotlight, or the graphical changes that make Yosemite attractive, including the translucency feature or leaving the dock on the desktop, and leaving folders or files of the desktop without the system slowing to a crawl, , everything is fine. Or course, Mail doesn't seem to be working very well...

Yosemite has improved the performance on my 17" mid 2009 MacBook Pro.

Snow Leopard brings back fond memories but I actually like Yosemite better.

For faster performance on an older machine, if you believe transparency/traslucency is a problem:

try:

System Preferences -> Accessibility -> display -> Reduce transparency

also try:

System Preferences -> Accessibility -> display -> Increase Contrast

Hello .

I just trow out Yosemite (not beta)  and installed Mavericks again.  The game performance on my iMac 27 mid 2011 i7 2gb AMD gpu was sluggish and unresponsive at times. Games that runned perfectly fine in Mavericks. I did both a upgrade and clean install of 10.10.  and same thing.  Yosemite performed the same or slower on this iMac as Mavericks on the overall use. You will NOT get a more responsive and quick mac by installing this upgrade. Most likely Yosemite will slow you down. So 10.9 is gonna stay on this iMac until end of times unless they provide a way to make it faster also in game performance. My os is installed on a Samsung 250 SSD,, 3.4 i7 cpu and 2 GB AMD 6970 GPU. Should not have any issues with performance but i did with Yosemite.

You could reinstall Yosemite to see if that helped or have an Apple tech look at it, you can make an appt at an Apple store.

I installed Yosemite on a 2009 13" MBP as a trial and it works just fine.

I do have issues with Mail and Safari, but they are not performance issues, they are feature(bug) issues.

After running 10.10 for a month on our test MBP we installed it on four 2011 Mini's and two 2012 iMacs, no problems.

Three weeks agoo we replaced 3 aging Mini's with a 2014 Mini (8Gb, 1Tb).

We have found that the newer machines are running much cooler than the 2009-2012 Mac's we're using.

In my experience, Yosemite runs fine but if you play games, don't upgrade! So far not one of my games work...they worked fine on Mavericks and Mountain Lion. Even Steam games are messed up. They are installed but don't show up. I haven't tested Photoshop yet. Overall, the system feels faster, but I still may revert back to Mavericks. At least everything worked pretty well on Mavericks.

I have both Mavericks and Yosemite and both seem about the same for speed.  However I have no "bug" issues on Mavericks but still have some on Yosemite.  I'm hoping Apple has some updates which will make Yosemite bug free probably just in time for Apple to release the next new (and buggy) OS.

1. Extremely poor performance, lagging in Finder along with all other apps, frequent system freezes. This was resolved by restoring the disc to factory settings (erasing the entire HD), re-downloading Yosemite and doing a clean install of it, followed by a data migration from a Time Machine backup.

 

2. App Store was broken. This was because I downgraded to iTunes 10.7, and for whatever strange reason, it turns out that doing so effectively destroys the App Store entirely. Reinstalled iTunes 12, entered a Terminal command to make it black for personal taste, and the App Store is running perfectly again.

 

3. Photoshop CS6 was running abominably, and causing regular system freezes. Apparently when using newer Mac OS X versions, PS and a Wacom tablet, this just happens on a fairly frequent basis. No idea why, but if you download Adobe's "WhiteWindowWorkaround" plugin, it makes everything run perfectly again.

 

So I went from having my Mac experience virtually destroyed by Yosemite, to it running better than it ever has, with an additional 20GB of HD space to boot. Hope this helps someone.

Sound completely reasonable the glitches and the work arounds, and a completely unreasonable amount of effort to tackle the problem...

In any case, Bravo!

Alas, all of that work on your side, just to give Apple more incentive to not support older Installed OS trees running on older hardware.  As if they already got burned by that via the real world results of their IOS updates already...

They give away for free now the OS to justify the trivial consumer features now being deployed only run on Apple products will be unsuitable for more advanced users anyways.  At the moment it is unclear if any Apple OS updates (Yosemite) on older iCore chipsets provides any enhanced support for that particular hardware,

Some of us have lives and things to do with our time, apparently Insanely Great for now is just Insane...

Glad you were able to safely migrate **** and high water...

Upgrade the OS only in absolute essential circumstances.

It just works? Don't upgrade...

Just want to add my three cents (inflation). I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard on a Macbook 13" (Early 2009, dual core 2.0GHz 64bit Intel, 2GB 667MHz DDR SDRAM, 160GB SATA 5400RPM HDD) then immediately upgraded to Yosemite. One wouldn't expect many artifacts and cruft from a fresh install then upgrade, but it seemed to run very sluggishly. Erased the drive, put SL back on, then followed some instructions I found with Google to create a USB Yosemite installer to do a fresh install.

Booting and getting started seemed to take much longer than SL but after everything got setup and apps got cached it seems pretty good. For example, TextEdit took around 10 seconds to start the first time but then it takes 3 seconds. Calculator took 5 seconds the first time, then 1-3 seconds the second time. Although I have to admit, 3 seconds to open a text editor stretches my patience. That should be one of the fastest apps on any system.

How memory works fooled me at first. A new install was using 2GB right out of the box?!? But I wasn't aware that the method of memory utilization had changed from Leopard, which is what this laptop originally had, to Yosemite. Yosemite uses RAM more like Linux, in that almost all of the physical RAM is in use almost all of the time, to cache frequently-used apps and files. That's actually pretty smart if you think about it.

I turned off transparency and increased contrast, I disabled the dashboard, I'm keeping a close eye on memory pressure, I'm closing apps when done with them using Cmd-Q, and I'm not installing any unnecessary 3rd party apps. (This will be an internet-only system. Probably the only apps will be Sophos and K9 web filter.) I think these are the keys to making Yosemite work well on old hardware with barely sufficient RAM.

Honestly I'd have preferred to keep it on Leopard. That was plenty fast. But the lack of security updates was a deal-killer. I'll try to update this thread after I've experienced Yosemite for a while.

By the way, I am very new to OS X. Back in 1998 I worked the AOL tech support (don't laugh, a computer geek has to start somewhere) for Mac Classic OSes 7 and 8. Since then I've been in IT for Windows and Linux and have hardly touched any Macs in the interim. Hated them every time I've used them mainly because I didn't know of the plethora of (almost too many) keyboard shortcuts, which are a big time-saver in Windows. I received this MB as a gift just a few days ago and have immersed myself into the world of fruit. (Namely, Apples.) And I must say, now that I understand a bit more how they work, they are pretty cool. I'll still remain a Win fan for desktops and Linux for servers, but Macs are no longer the hateful things they once were. I think Time Machine surprised me the most. So simple, yet better functionality than anything I've used in other operating systems. And being a Unix sysadmin I welcome the Bash terminal :-)

There are still a few nagging things about Yosemite and OS X. For example, I'm not a fan of Spaces -- I didn't like similar functionality in Linux, either -- and I can't yet seem to disable them. When you full-screen Safari and auto-hide the dock, placing your mouse where the Dock is to raise it doesn't always work right away, but in not-maximized mode it's instant. Little niggling things like that. But on the whole, color me impressed. I can see why people line up around the block to buy the newest iThingy.

To summarize the discussion thus far, the answer to your question appears to be an unqualified "Yes".

cdevidal wrote:

 

Probably the only apps will be Sophos and K9 web filter.

Nope. I removed Sophos. Super slow! This thread suggests ClamXAV instead:

Yosemite slow, Beach ball always spinning when changing windows, doing activities

In My experience, upgrading to Yosemite had a clear advantage, I could answer and make phone calls from my two Macs

But, it seems that apple is not what it used to be... The "it just works" slogan turned into "it just doesn´t work"... After installing Yosemitie that is exactly what happened: I answer a phone call and my iphone keeps ringing and at other times the ring tone is also keeps on sounding in my mac while the call is taking place... ***?

Then you right click on a file for the contextual menu, Open with... and instead of showing me the right applications for the file, it displays "fetching"... and the swirling circle and after a long while it does what Mavericks use to do in a nanosecond.

Why?

Why is it Apple ruining OSX?

Why did they created an awkward design for Yosemite?

The worse part is that they make nearly impossible to downgrade to Mavericks... I had to make a USB bootable device to reinstall everything to come back to Mavericks.

I had the same experience in both of my Retina Macbook 2013 and my late 2011 iMac

Mavericks & Snow Leopard are the best OSX versions so far. If they keep this direction, I might return to Windows or who knows? Maybe Android will be ready for Desktop by then.

DO NOT UPGRADE!