Upgrading your Mac to OS Sierra
If you have owned your Mac for a few years, chances are it is becoming a little slow and glitchy. You might be counting up the dollars to see if you can upgrade to a new machine, but let’s face it, a new MacBook is not cheap.
Before you go down the route of spending all next year’s holiday savings, we have spoken to the experts in MacBook repair from Fixapplenow.com to see how you might be able to get your old MacBook running like new, and top of the list comes upgrading the operating system to the macOS Sierra, which was released towards the end of last year.
Are you compatible?
The first thing to check is whether your machine is capable of running the latest OS. In short, the answer is yes if you have any of the following:
MacBook (late 2009 onwards)
- iMac (2009 onwards)
- MacBook Air (2010 onwards)
- MacBook Pro (2010 onwards)
- Mac Pro (2010 onwards)
- Mac Mini (2010 onwards)
If your MacBook is more than seven years old, then it is probably time to acknowledge that it has given great service and treat yourself to a full upgrade anyway.
About Sierra
As far as the visual interface is concerned, Sierra looks at first glance very similar to its predecessor, El Cap. The main difference that you will immediately notice is that you have tabs at your disposal in a variety of apps, not just the web browser. They are now featured in Mail, Maps, TextEdit and any third party app where multiple windows are supported.
It is not till you venture into the features roster that you will start to see the main differences, such as the Universal Clipboard, which lets you copy and paste data between devices. This is a great innovation if you also use an iPad, and saves the hassle of emailing things to yourself or transferring them via the cloud.
But for most people, upgrading to Sierra is all about Siri.
What about Siri?
Voice command is big business, and it is what everyone seems to want since Alexa barged onto the scene last year, launching Amazon into the stratosphere and leaving Apple and Google racing to catch up.
Sierra provides the functionality for Siri to at least make up some ground on her Amazonian rival, and it gives you the ability to control your Mac verbally, using the Siri engine from your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or Apple TV.
As well as being fun and funky, the voice command option is really handy when you are searching through documents. It means you can use natural phrases and language to specify what you are looking for, and the results will be waiting for you in the Notifications pane, where you can drag and drop them as you wish.
Siri also provides a hassle-free way to do those tasks that would ordinarily require you to go fumbling around in the Systems window, such as saying “Enable airplane mode” or “Switch on Bluetooth.”