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MacOS Upgrade?

My Mac is a few years old, and I'm running High Sierra version 10.13.6.


For Garageband purposes, is it worth upgrading to a different MacOS?

Posted on Jan 21, 2021 10:16 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 21, 2021 10:48 AM

The version of GarageBand available on the App Store requires your mac to be running macOS Big Sur 11.0


Click on the  top left of your screen click on About This Mac to find out the year of your mac.


Check if your mac meets the requirements, open Safari and click on the link below.

How to upgrade to macOS Big Sur - Apple Support


Before upgrading make a full back up of your Mac.


Check that third party apps you use have updates available for the new OS.

https://roaringapps.com

Check that your printers/ scanners etc have updated drivers and software available for the new OS.


Connect your mac to your router via cable rather than rely on WiFi.

Do not use your mac while it is downloading

and do not use any other devices that share the same internet connection.


If you are considering upgrading to Big Sur be warned it does not support 32bit apps.

Your Mac is probably running 32bit apps and these will need to be updated to 64bit apps,

some updates may be free, some may be paid. Use this app to discover which apps you have

are 32bit, https://www.stclairsoft.com/Go64/ then contact the developers of the software to see

if they are offering 64bit updates.

5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 21, 2021 10:48 AM in response to Iguanaman17

The version of GarageBand available on the App Store requires your mac to be running macOS Big Sur 11.0


Click on the  top left of your screen click on About This Mac to find out the year of your mac.


Check if your mac meets the requirements, open Safari and click on the link below.

How to upgrade to macOS Big Sur - Apple Support


Before upgrading make a full back up of your Mac.


Check that third party apps you use have updates available for the new OS.

https://roaringapps.com

Check that your printers/ scanners etc have updated drivers and software available for the new OS.


Connect your mac to your router via cable rather than rely on WiFi.

Do not use your mac while it is downloading

and do not use any other devices that share the same internet connection.


If you are considering upgrading to Big Sur be warned it does not support 32bit apps.

Your Mac is probably running 32bit apps and these will need to be updated to 64bit apps,

some updates may be free, some may be paid. Use this app to discover which apps you have

are 32bit, https://www.stclairsoft.com/Go64/ then contact the developers of the software to see

if they are offering 64bit updates.

Jan 21, 2021 10:00 PM in response to Iguanaman17

If your mac is only 3 years old it can upgrade to macOS Big Sur,

you need 35.5GBS of free space to install macOS Big Sur.


To free up space you would need to offload files you do not need on a daily basis to an external drive.

Files that tend to take up the most room are movies, images and music.

Once you have successfully copied items over to your external drive then you can delete them from your

mac.

GarageBand projects take up a lot of space.


Quite often the Storage details are wrong on your mac

resetting the Spotlight index may help.


How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac – Apple Support

Move the Macintosh HD (or the name you gave your disk) in to the Privacy panel.

Quit System Preferences.

Open System Preferences> Spotlight> Privacy highlight Macintosh HD and press the minus button.

The mac will start rebuilding the Spotlight index.

Check by clicking on Spotlight in the menubar and enter word, if it is indexing you should see a progress bar.


If re-indexing has not solved your problem then run this app, https://www.omnigroup.com/more

this will give an accurate account of the storage used. When the app has created its overview you can look at

the Users folder in the output and see what each user has stored, you can then delete files from there.

Do not delete any files or folders in any System or Library folders or any files you do not understand.

MacOS Upgrade?

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