Visit this Apple Support page to learn more about upgrading your Mac. Note: If you have Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard), you will need to download OS X El Capitan before you can upgrade to the latest Mac OS. While insecure versions of Firefox will continue to work on OS X 10.8 and earlier, using an up-to-date version of Firefox on a. OS X Version: Mountain Lion (10.8), most models. Mavericks (10.9) or higher — all models. Click the Apple icon at the top left of your screen. Select 'About This Mac.' The number underneath 'OS X' is your version number. If you're running a version of OS X older than 10.8, look into upgrading your OS X. Open that app from your Applications folder to start installing the operating system. MacOS Sierra 10.12 can upgrade El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion or Lion OS X El Capitan 10.11 can upgrade Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion or Snow Leopard.

WARNING: If you have updated boot.efi on a MacPro1,1 or MacPro2,1 so you can run Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan, DO NOT INSTALL SECURITY UPDATE 2018-001. According to Greg Hrutkay of Hrutkay Mods (see warning video), it breaks boot.efi on the 2006 and 2007 Mac Pros that have been thus updated.

With OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Apple continues its annual march to newer, better, more powerful versions of Mac OS X. Best of all, El Capitan runs on the same Macs that support OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, 10.9 Mavericks, or 10.10 Yosemite.

Let’s take a look at what’s new!

More Speed

Apple claims El Capitan does nearly everything faster than earlier versions of OS X, with apps launching up to 40% faster, app switching twice as fast, and Preview displaying a PDF four times as fast.

On the gaming front, there’s Metal, a core graphics technology that gives programmers better access to a graphics card’s capabilities. Apple claims draw calls are up to 10x faster than in Yosemite, and also that web pages will render 40% faster.

Ars Technica has compared Metal with OpenGL and found decidedly mixed results that are very dependent on your graphics hardware. Each renders some things better than the other.

Split View

Ever since System 7, Macs have been able to run more than one program at a time. And even on the itty bitty 9″ 512 x 342 pixel displays of those compact early Macs, it was possible to view open windows from two or more apps at the same time. But it was up to you to arrange those windows.

With Split View, OS X finally gets a feature that’s been available through third-party apps for years: Automatically splitting the window to display two apps side-by-side on today’s much larger displays. (iOS 9 brings the same capability to iPads.)

As someone who is almost always working with two or more apps, this could become a very useful feature. Unfortunately, my only Mac capable of running El Capitan is a 13″ Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook, and its 1280 x 800 display already feels cramped. But with an external display, things will be much better.

Find Your Cursor

The bigger the display, the harder it can be to find your cursor. With El Capitan, jiggle your finger on the trackpad or jiggle your mouse, and it gets bigger – and easier to find.

Mail

Apple has been tinkering with Mail forever, sometimes ruining the app, sometimes bringing back ease-of-use lost over the “upgrade” cycle. Word on the street is that Mail in El Capitan finally gets things right again. I can’t say; I don’t use it.

I gave up on the OS X Mail app years ago. I’ve been using Postbox for a while now, and I love it. Postbox is a commercial email client based on Mozilla Thunderbird. I’m more than happy to use an email program that works consistently on my various Macs, although I have not yet upgraded from version 3. Version 4 still supports OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and later on Macs capable of running 64-bit software.

Notes

If you haven’t already discovered Evernote, you might find the updated Notes app a big step forward. It finally lets you edit notes and sync them between OS X and iOS devices.

Or you can use the free Evernote app, which is available for OS X, iOS, Android, and Windows. If you need more space than for base membership supports, you can upgrade to Evernote Plus or Evernote Premium for a fee. The free version works for me.

Then again, Notes is a completely new app now. It can handle PDFs, photos, web links, map locations, create checklists, and much more, and it will sync them between OS X El Capitan and iOS 9 devices – only.

Mission Control

Apple has updated Mission Control, which has been part of OS X since 10.8 Mountain Lion. Mission Control makes it easy to find an application window by displaying thumbnails of all open windows on your display and letting you click on the one you want.

Mission Control is a feature I will admit to never having used.

Spotlight

Spotlight has been around since OS X 10.4 Tiger, and El Capitan takes it to the next level. Where Spotlight started out as a way to collect information on any file on your hard drive(s), it now goes beyond your Mac. You can do natural language searches – and search sources on the Internet.

I’ve never found Spotlight very useful. I almost always search by file name, so all those extra search capabilities in Spotlight are lost on me.

Live Photos

Apple’s new Live Photos image format is a cross between the traditional still photo and a video. When you use Live Photo for your shots, your iPhone 6S or 6S Plus records 1.5 seconds before and after you touch the shutter button, sound included. Only the iPhone 6 and 6S support Live Photos – plus any Mac capable of running OS X 10.11 El Capitan and it Photos app.

Here’s hoping Apple supports image editing for Live Photos – it’s a sure thing no existing app supports them yet. Facebook plans to support Live Photos on its iOS app by the end of the year.

Safari

Yeah, yeah, another iteration of Apple’s own web browser. You can now pin your favorite sites and turn off the volume in a tab without having to open it.

Maps

Probably not as big a deal on your Mac as on an iPhone or iPad, OS X Maps is keeping up with features on the iOS versions, including mass transit. And if your iDevice is running iOS 9, you can send your route to it.

San Francisco: Putting a New (Type) Face on OS X

One distinctive thing that immediately set the Macintosh apart from other personal computers was its use of fonts, including the system font used for the menu bar and pull-down menus. In the earliest versions of the Mac OS and up to Mac OS 7.6, the system font was Chicago.

With the introduction of Mac OS 8 and its Platinum interface, Charcoal was introduced as the new system font. It’s not very different from Chicago, and we’ve been using it on our header graphic for years.

Apple made a lot of changes with the introduction of Mac OS X, and using Lucida Grande as the system font was one of them. Lucida Grande remained the system font through OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

With OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple moved to Helvetica Neue as its system font, the same typeface use on iPhones and iPads starting with iOS 7. And now it’s changed the system font once again, adopting the San Francisco font developed for Apple Watch.

Other Fonts

In addition to San Francisco, Apple has a new Chinese font, PingFang, “with thousands of redesigned characters and six new line weights”, as well as four new Japanese fonts. Apple has also improved trackpad input for Chinese.

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So, you’ve decided to download an older version of Mac OS X. There are many reasons that could point you to this radical decision. To begin with, some of your apps may not be working properly (or simply crash) on newer operating systems. Also, you may have noticed your Mac’s performance went down right after the last update. Finally, if you want to run a parallel copy of Mac OS X on a virtual machine, you too will need a working installation file of an older Mac OS X. Further down we’ll explain where to get one and what problems you may face down the road.

A list of all Mac OS X versions

We’ll be repeatedly referring to these Apple OS versions below, so it’s good to know the basic macOS timeline.

Os X El Capitan Dmg

STEP 1. Prepare your Mac for installation

Given your Mac isn’t new and is filled with data, you will probably need enough free space on your Mac. This includes not just space for the OS itself but also space for other applications and your user data. One more argument is that the free space on your disk translates into virtual memory so your apps have “fuel” to operate on. The chart below tells you how much free space is needed.

Note, that it is recommended that you install OS on a clean drive. Next, you will need enough disk space available, for example, to create Recovery Partition. Here are some ideas to free up space on your drive:

• Uninstall large unused apps
• Empty Trash Bin and Downloads
• Locate the biggest files on your computer:

Go to Finder > All My Files > Arrange by size
Then you can move your space hoggers onto an external drive or a cloud storage.
If you aren’t comfortable with cleaning the Mac manually, there are some nice automatic “room cleaners”. Our favorite is CleanMyMac as it’s most simple to use of all. It deletes system junk, old broken apps, and the rest of hidden junk on your drive.

Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.4 - 10.8 (free version)

Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.9 (free version)

Download CleanMyMac for OS 10.10 - 10.14 (free version)

STEP 2. Get a copy of Mac OS X download

Normally, it is assumed that updating OS is a one-way road. That’s why going back to a past Apple OS version is problematic. The main challenge is to download the OS installation file itself, because your Mac may already be running a newer version. If you succeed in downloading the OS installation, your next step is to create a bootable USB or DVD and then reinstall the OS on your computer.

How to download older Mac OS X versions via the App Store

If you once had purchased an old version of Mac OS X from the App Store, open it and go to the Purchased tab. There you’ll find all the installers you can download. However, it doesn’t always work that way. The purchased section lists only those operating systems that you had downloaded in the past. But here is the path to check it:

1. Click the App Store icon.
2. Click Purchases in the top menu.
3. Scroll down to find the preferred OS X version.
4. Click Download.

This method allows you to download Mavericks and Yosemite by logging with your Apple ID — only if you previously downloaded them from the Mac App Store.

Without App Store: Download Mac OS version as Apple Developer

If you are signed with an Apple Developer account, you can get access to products that are no longer listed on the App Store. If you desperately need a lower OS X version build, consider creating a new Developer account among other options. The membership cost is $99/year and provides a bunch of perks unavailable to ordinary users.

Nevertheless, keep in mind that if you visit developer.apple.com/downloads, you can only find 10.3-10.6 OS X operating systems there. Newer versions are not available because starting Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.7, the App Store has become the only source of updating Apple OS versions.

Purchase an older version of Mac operating system

You can purchase a boxed or email version of past Mac OS X directly from Apple. Both will cost you around $20. For the reason of being rather antiquated, Snow Leopard and earlier Apple versions can only be installed from DVD.

Buy a boxed edition of Snow Leopard 10.6
Get an email copy of Lion 10.7
Get an email copy of Mountain Lion 10.8

The email edition comes with a special download code you can use for the Mac App Store. Note, that to install the Lion or Mountain Lion, your Mac needs to be running Snow Leopard so you can install the newer OS on top of it.

How to get macOS El Capitan download

If you are wondering if you can run El Capitan on an older Mac, rejoice as it’s possible too. But before your Mac can run El Capitan it has to be updated to OS X 10.6.8. So, here are main steps you should take:

1. Install Snow Leopard from install DVD.
2. Update to 10.6.8 using Software Update.
3. Download El Capitan here.

“I can’t download an old version of Mac OS X”

If you have a newer Mac, there is no physical option to install Mac OS versions older than your current Mac model. For instance, if your MacBook was released in 2014, don’t expect it to run any OS released prior of that time, because older Apple OS versions simply do not include hardware drivers for your Mac.

But as it often happens, workarounds are possible. There is still a chance to download the installation file if you have an access to a Mac (or virtual machine) running that operating system. For example, to get an installer for Lion, you may ask a friend who has Lion-operated Mac or, once again, set up a virtual machine running Lion. Then you will need to prepare an external drive to download the installation file using OS X Utilities.

After you’ve completed the download, the installer should launch automatically, but you can click Cancel and copy the file you need. Below is the detailed instruction how to do it.

STEP 3. Install older OS X onto an external drive

The following method allows you to download Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks.

1. Start your Mac holding down Command + R.
2. Prepare a clean external drive (at least 10 GB of storage).
3. Within OS X Utilities, choose Reinstall OS X.
4. Select external drive as a source.
5. Enter your Apple ID.

Now the OS should start downloading automatically onto the external drive. After the download is complete, your Mac will prompt you to do a restart, but at this point, you should completely shut it down. Now that the installation file is “captured” onto your external drive, you can reinstall the OS, this time running the file on your Mac.

1. Boot your Mac from your standard drive.
2. Connect the external drive.
3. Go to external drive > OS X Install Data.

Locate InstallESD.dmg disk image file — this is the file you need to reinstall Lion OS X. The same steps are valid for Mountain Lion and Mavericks.

How to downgrade a Mac running later macOS versions

If your Mac runs macOS Sierra 10.12 or macOS High Sierra 10.13, it is possible to revert it to the previous system if you are not satisfied with the experience. You can do it either with Time Machine or by creating a bootable USB or external drive.
Instruction to downgrade from macOS Sierra

Instruction to downgrade from macOS High Sierra

Mac Os X Lion 10.7.5 To El Capitan

Instruction to downgrade from macOS Mojave

Instruction to downgrade from macOS Catalina

Before you do it, the best advice is to back your Mac up so your most important files stay intact. In addition to that, it makes sense to clean up your Mac from old system junk files and application leftovers. The easiest way to do it is to run CleanMyMac X on your machine (download it for free here).

Visit your local Apple Store to download older OS X version

Upgrade Os X Lion To El Capitan

If none of the options to get older OS X worked, pay a visit to nearest local Apple Store. They should have image installations going back to OS Leopard and earlier. You can also ask their assistance to create a bootable USB drive with the installation file. So here you are. We hope this article has helped you to download an old version of Mac OS X. Below are a few more links you may find interesting.