Jose,
Thanks very much for the pointer to Howard’s article on the ‘merging’ of the two application folders. Sort of a Vulcan mind meld! His website contains a wealth of knowledge.
I agree with your suggestion. I’ve used several older iMacs with external SSD boot drives connected via USB-3 and thought they ran very well.
Yep. Sorry. I remember a library where all OS images were up to date installs. I used that library to install Tiger on Qemu-4 a virtual machine from emaculation.com.
This doesn’t work either, being vectored to the App store shows a Monterey app but its a frontend to see if I qualify for Monterey which I am not. So no joy there either.
But appreciate the thoughts. Mike
Mike,
The App Store is being too clever for our own good. It appears to inspect the make/model of the Mac being used and decides that your iMac (a late-2013, as I recall) is too old to run Monterey.
One workaround is to find a friend with a newer Mac model (one compatible with Monterey) and use that to download the installer. Then save to a USB stick. I used that method once long ago.
I’ve been able to get the latest release of Monterey installed on a new external SSD (formatted with APFS), and then used it boot up my neighbor’s 2015 iMac. It’s MUCH faster than running from the iMac’s internal 1TB rotating drive with APFS. This afternoon, I ran Migration Assistant and started the tedious process of copying over his user account from a backup USB drive. The transfer is going to take hours, so I will check back on it tomorrow.
What version are you looking for again?
Diane
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You don’t need to use a newer computer if know where to look. The following link has the Monterey installers:
The MrMacintosh site has links to other OS as well.
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See my post above regarding the MrMacintosh site.
Many thanks for that link to Mr. Macintosh. I knew there was a repository out there on the interweb somewhere.
Have bookmarked for future reference.
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As a former manager and software developer for one computer manufacturers, and a deep tech support consultant for another, I cannot recommend this tactic. Why?
The answer is Support and Restoration.
a. If you call Apple support and they look at your machine version and your MacOS version, the answer will be either, “how can I help you”, or “‘we don’t support this configuration’ and click”.
b. How will this rogue OS interact with your backup system, e.g., Time Machine? A normal install will replace the old macOS with the new one.
Too risky and for myself " to many I don’t knows".
Mike
Erasing the internal hard drive and falling back to High Sierra, while possible, isn’t as straight forward as you might expect it to be. See:
Revert drive from APFS to HFS+
REVERTING AN APFS DRIVE TO HFS+ THE EASY WAY
High Sierra was the last version of the Mac OS that didn’t non-optionally convert your internal drive to APFS.
I skimmed the replies, not seeing what I’d would recommend. I just upgraded a 2015 MBP to Monterey from Mojave.
I highly suggest a SSD, but to mount internally. Before disembarking on such watch a few YouTube videos on cracking open the iMac and installing SSD, I am sure there are plenty. I highly suggest watching more than one, three should be sufficient, AND/or a webpage with pictures, try iFixit.com, or OWC for such. When getting SSD, get an external case for present internal.
I updated (at the same time) the SSD in this MBP, from 500GB, to 1 TB, which I got on the mac swamp list, it is faster than the stock one by 15% or so, but the old was measured under Mojave, HFS+, the new Monterey, APFS, I think.
Boot from the old spinning HD attached as external, download Monterey and install fresh copy on new SSD. Then boot from new OS on SSD and during set up use Migration assistant to move your old apps, account(s) and data files. Done.
My MBP is lively than ever! I would highly discourage updating an OS (not patches, security updates, that’s OK, I mean major OS versions), the ‘normal’ way, but to do it this way, it doesn’t transfer over a bunch of no longer used system stuff.
I also did this, about the same time with an older (2011) MBP running El Capitan, which Apple has let all the certificates expire, so it can’t access 95% of the web. When I updated that machine to El Capitan I had a hard time with Mathamatica, LabView, and MatLab, getting them to run again (search found which pref files to delete, and maybe a few other things). I really can’t justify upgrading those apps (at least a few $K), so I never upgraded from El Capitan. So I used an SSD external, installed High Sierra, same procedure of booting from that, and using Migration Assistant to move account(s), apps, and data over. Booting from the new HS, amazingly everything was happy, other than Micro$oft Office (see my write up here on that fiasco). I can still boot from El Capitan as an external disk and run that version of Office, so I don’t understand why Micro$oft can’t recover the Product ID, so I can use that on the same package, transferred over, running under High Sierra. Trying to install any later version of Office on this MBP, office calls the mothership, and won’t do the blessing. Micro$oft Engineers says its Apple not allowing Office installs on 3 OS’s older than current, I don’t understand how Apple comes between Office on my computer, using a direct connection to Micro$oft to being blessed by Micro$oft servers. So to get around this, Micro$oft Engineers helped me install an older version of Office, than I had, where they had the Program ID Code, not sure why they couldn’t do that with the version I had. Though thinking back the two months, the older version I am now running may have been the one I left on the machine after getting the ‘newer’ version I don’t have the product code for.
Mojave gave you the option to not reformat to AFFS.
I’m sorry, but it is well known that it does not. At least not for your internal (boot) drive.
It may be possible to avoid automatic reformatting to APFS by applying a kludge:
Actually, I’m very surprised that there hasn’t been a class action lawsuit against Apple for crippling Macs with RDHD’s with APFS the way that there was a class action lawsuit against Apple for crippling iPhones. Mojave and later should have a huge warning pop up that tells users that applying this OS upgrade will harm Macs with a RDHD.
What’s “RDHD”? Rotating Disk Hard Drive? And what harm are you referring to–harm to an internal drive (I’ve updated both a 2013 and a 2019 iMac to Mojave and had no problems, but they had SSD internal drives)?
Correct.
For those who haven’t heard, APFS is optimized for SSD’s. For RDHD’s…it turns them into dogs.
From Mike Bombich of Carbon Copy Cloner fame:
“I’m convinced that Apple made a fundamental design choice in APFS that makes its performance worse than HFS+ on rotational disks. Performance starts out at a significant deficit to HFS+ (OS X Extended) and declines linearly as you add files to the volume.”
…
“The other time that the performance difference will be starkly noticeable is when you’re booting macOS from a rotational HDD. macOS seeks and stats thousands of files during the startup process, and if that’s taking 15 times longer on a rotational disk, then your 30-second startup process is going to turn into 8 minutes. When the system does finally boot, the system and apps will still feel sluggish as all of your applications load, and those applications each stat hundreds of files. The system is still usable, especially as a rescue backup device, but it’s not the kind of experience you’d want for a production startup disk nor for a high-stress restore scenario.”
An analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drives
https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs-enumeration-performance-on-rotational-hard-drives
" After 16 months of using and testing APFS—Apple’s new file system—I’ve come to the conclusion that you probably don’t want to use it on HDDs (disks with rotating platters)."
Using APFS On HDDs … And Why You Might Not Want To
According to Joe Kissell (author of Take Control of Monterey), the performance of APFS on a mechanical hard drive is “terrible”, and “almost completely unusable”. Joe wrote “if you have a Mac with a plain hard drive, you should think twice about installing Monterey”.
I briefly considered replacing the internal HD with an SSD, but decided to go with an external SSD instead. This model of iMac (late-2015) rates a 1/10 repairability score - changing out the drive is not as easy as it used to be. The iMac belongs to a neighbor, and I didn’t want to risk damaging it with inartful disassembly/reassembly. Nor spend the time.
Besides, Monterey is the end of the line for this model. It won’t be long before Monterey falls off Apple’s support list, at which point it will be time to retire the iMac. When that happens, the external SSD can be repurposed.
With 12.6.5 installed on a new 1TB external SSD (Samsung 980 NVMe, connected with USB), the iMac is running just fine. Seems more responsive than when it was new.
My springer spaniel (who is exceedingly fast when out chasing squirrels and other creatures) would be offended by this characterization. I think a better description is that APFS turns rotating drives into slugs 
, or sloths…
I heartily agree with Mssrs. Bombich and Kissell. After my neighbor inadvertently installed Monterey on his old 2015 iMac – which merrily converted the internal 1TB drive to APFS – the iMac became pretty much unusable. It took many minutes to boot. When launching apps, the Dock icon would bounce up and down for 30-60 seconds before the app appeared. Opening Sys Preferences routinely took a minute or more. Routine daily activities (opening web pages, reading emails) were painfully tedious.
The situation is actually worse than that – Apple actively solicited the migration from High Sierra to Monterey with a prompt to upgrade. The owner of this 2015 iMac is an elderly gentleman who has been using Macs for over 30 years. (he still has the long-forgotten “Mac Portable” in his collection of old Apple gear). He’d never heard of APFS, nor had any understanding of the implications of updating to Monterey. His iMac indicated an upgrade was available. He trusted Apple, clicked OK, and ended up with a seriously impaired computer. As far as I’m concerned, Software Update on Mojave and later shouldn’t even be proposing an OS upgrade on Macs with rotating drives.
Fortunately, the addition of an external SSD (configured as the startup drive) has provided a pathway out of his APFS debacle, and bought a few more years of life for his iMac.
I don’t have a leg to stand on. The drive that was updated the ‘normal’ way to Mojave has been repurposed so I can’t check its format.
It will run considerable faster booting off the internal drive. I went for about 2 months this way on moving from Mojave to Monterey (why so long is a long story**). One ‘got you’ was right clicking on a word to look it up. The internal is almost instant, the external (that became the internal) took like 10 seconds sometimes.
I am in the same boat with this 2015 MBP, Monterey is the last OS for it too, but there is a hack to allow you to install Ventura. I did that to a 2008 and 2009 MBPs to install High Sierra, that worked just fine. Problem being later updates are hard to install. I am not sure if I am going to go that route on this 2015 MBP (which I got in ~2019 off e-bay, as I needed to replace that 2008/HS with a new laptop but wanted to avoid the butterfly keyboard). Long story, but I learned* it was ‘hot’ and was stolen from Hulu, so that required talking to LAPD, and giving them all the information from my purchase history on e-bay, all in the international gate area at the O’Hare airport (I did get some stares from other travelers) on trip from Albuquerque to Northern Norway for a 6 week stint at Alomar Observatory.
*I used it to install Catalina on an external drive, then put that into DIL’s 2012 MBP. On booting and filling out all the intro info, once the WiFi was set up, the setup froze and said computer was reported stolen and to call Hulu IT department with a phone number. I assumed it was the DIL’s 2012 computer that was hot, nope, it was the 2015 that installed the OS onto that drive that was hot, took sometime to figure that one out.
**Hulu did ‘release’ the hold, and I was able to upgrade from Mojave to Monterey.