It really shouldn’t be this good.
In one of my last posts I talked about OCLP and how it enables you to run newer macOS versions on older and unsupported hardware.
Today I wan’t to talk about my experience with macOS 15.2 running on a 13- inch MacBook Pro from early 2015.
About that MacBook
Originally this MacBook was purchased by my Wife. She wanted it to be able to type up some documents and to watch movies and such. When we bought that device it was running macOS 10.15 Catalina, eventhough it would have been able to run up to macOS 12 Monterey natively. But since the previous owner didn’t do it, it still ran Catalina.
Equipped with a massive dual-core i5 5257U and 8GBs of RAM, this seemed like a great little device.
This MacBook cost her around 200€ and included the original packaging, which is something I always like to see. The Power Supply was in dire need of replacing, since the cable was breaking around the Magsafe Connector, as it’s usual for this model of charger.
I purchased a new charger from Amazon and called it a day.
Something the previous owner didn’t know is, that someone (not the person I bought it from) actually upgraded the SSD to a 512GB Aura Drive. Very nice, considering we only paid 200€ for the MacBook and got a free storage upgrade.
Of course it also had problems with “Stain Gate”, but neither I nor my Wife ever really cared.
I upgraded the OS to Monterey, installed Microsoft Office and handed it over.
After a few months, my wife decided that she’d rather have an iPad instead of the MacBook. So we bought an iPad for her and I took over the MacBook.
Since I already dealt with a bunch of devices in combination with OCLP, I decided to install a newer version of macOS as well. This was around the time macOS 15 was released, so I thought I’d give it a try.
I did the typical install and did the patches. And that’s where it got really weird and scary.
The performance is scary.
After everything was set and done, I started installing my applications and instantly noticed, that macOS 15 ran even better than macOS 14.
I had tried macOS 14 before on this device, but only to see if it would work. The performance of that was sluggish and I could really feel how slow it was.
But with macOS 15, all of that changed.
Performance was actually good – besides the boot-times which actually are crazy slow – but overall system performance for day to day use is massive.
Of course, graphically intensive stuff like CleanMyMac 5 is pretty bad (because yes, we need 3D animations in a cleaning software?), but browsing, Word documents, Excel Sheets and even development really work great.
So? What can I say?
If you have one of those devices lying around, maybe give macOS 15 a try. You can take a look at my OCLP Article to find out how to do it.
Other than that, I hope you liked this article.
See ya! 🙂
