Here are the requirements for the latest OS X 10.13, High Sierra.įinding and downloading an old macOS version Here’s a hardware compatibility list for OS X versions 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion), 10.8 (Mountain Lion), 10.9 (Mavericks), 10.10 (Yosemite), 10.11 (El Capitan), and 10.12 (Sierra). You need to know if your Mac’s hardware is compatible with the old version of OS X you’ve chosen to install.

Only you can decide which old version of OS X you want to install, but you can’t just grab any version from any time period and install it on any Mac. As we’ll see in a bit, they do allow you to download old versions of OS X that you previously purchased and/or downloaded through the Mac App Store using a valid Apple ID. Be sure to consult Apple’s End User License Agreement and its Terms and Conditions before proceeding. I’m pretty sure that according to Apple’s rules, you can only run one version of OS X on one Mac at a time. That’s a big potential target audience for whom you can build apps. There are millions of people out there with Macs. So while this tutorial is of course open to anyone who needs to roll back their OS, my core audience of iOS developers should give it a read and consider practicing developing some macOS apps. It behooves you to know something about OS X. If you’ve been developing for more than even a year, then you know that Apple pushes out a new OS about once a year and also pushes out a new Xcode version once a year. You probably heavily use Git, Xcode command-line tools, or development tools like CocoaPods. I will show you, step by step, how to get a valid copy of an older version of macOS, make a bootable installer disk, and install the old OS.Īs iOS developers, you’re probably mostly concentrated on using Xcode and perhaps a few supplementary Mac apps, like Safari, TextEdit, or Pages, to develop apps for iPhone (iOS), iPad (iOS), Apple Watch (watchOS), and Apple TV (tvOS). For Cocoa/macOS developers, you may need to make absolutely sure that your desktop apps are backward compatible, and the only way to do that for sure is to install and run your apps on older versions of macOS. For developers, you may have to install an older version of Xcode not supported by your latest OS. You might have been like “Get me the heck outta Dodge!” You wanted or needed to get back to a stable OS, like Sierra (OS X 10.12) or El Capitan (OS X 10.11). Remember all the problems people had when they upgraded to OS X 10.13, also known as “High Sierra?” Oy, vey. You may find that your current instance of OS X is too unstable for normal day-to-day usage or more heavy-duty tasks like development. We’re going to talk about installing a version of your Mac’s operating system (OS), known as “macOS” or “OS X,” on your Mac, older than the one you’re currently running, on a partition of your primary hard drive or on an external hard drive.

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