2012 Non-Retina MacBook Pro [CD-Slot] Honest Performance on 10.13

[PhasedWolf]

Hey, Guys,
I'm new here, and I was curious. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro, The one without the Retina display as it says up top and I was wondering, I tried the first beta in the hopes it would act like iOS 11 beta 1 [Which was very sturdy for the time on the iPod Touch 6th Gen] but all I got was unresponsiveness, hot and crashing within the span of 30 minutes. Seeming that it's now on the GM now, I was wondering as to whether I stay on 10.12, upgrade to 10.13 when the time is right. Or get more ram, as I've only just recently gotten a 480 GB SSD which made it faster after taking out the merely weak 5,400rpm Hard Drive, hope someone has an answer. I mainly use this for school and typing stories as well as importing CDs. Thanks, guys!

 

[TylerL]

High Sierra Beta 1 was a complete mess for me with similar-vintage hardware.

The later betas (and now GM candidate) smoothed things out very well, and I'm using the GM candidate as my daily driver on both a Mid-2012 MacBook Air at home, and a Mid-2012 MacBook Pro (just like yours) at work.

The 2012 (Ivy Bridge) Macs are the oldest that support Metal 2, so they're still taking advantage of performance improvements built into the system.

An SSD was the best upgrade you could make for your machine. More RAM would make things even better, especially if you're at 4GB or less.

 

[EugW]

I am typing on a High Sierra 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook with a slow Kingston V+100 128 GB SSD and 4 GB RAM. Speed is fine for light usage. OS is overall quite responsive.

My High Sierra 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with faster Samsung 840 EVO 120 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM is even better, since you can do real multi-tasking with the 8 GB RAM and the faster SSD makes the OS fast.

These machines have the High Sierra GM, which is much better than the early betas. I have no problem recommending High Sierra on any 2+ GHz Core 2 Duo with a decent SSD and 8 GB RAM.

In fact, after I installed HS on the 2.26 GHz MBP, I went out and bought a used 2.0 GHz MBP specifically to install HS on it as a kitchen computer, because the results on the MBP with HS were so good.

BTW, I also have HS on a 2017 Core m3 MacBook with uber fast PCIe SSD and 16 GB RAM, so it’s not as if I don’t know what I’m missing speed-wise.