macOS 14 Sonoma on a 15 year old Mac (classic Mac Pro 2008)

macOS Sonoma is out and OpenCore Legacy Patcher as of a few days ago has been updated to support it. I decided to put Sonoma on the oldest computer I own to see how well it’d work.

Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/dmug

0:00 Intro and specs
1:37 Quick OpenCore overview
2:00 From Snow Leopard to High Sierra
4:17 Installing OCLP
6:05 Big Sur to Sonoma
7:02 Part 2! Running Sonoma
7:50 4k!?!
8:25 New Sonoma features
9:28 Testing the problem apps
10:11 The bugs I found…
11:56 Testing out games
12:57 PlayStation 2 & PS3 Emulation
13:57 Uningine Heaven Benchmarks 10.9 vs 14
14:35 Phoronix Benchmarks
16:46 Pixelmator Pro
17:30 USB 1.1 & USBc
17:59 Testing Apple Compressor and Motion
18:55 Should you upgrade?
19:37 Closing thoughts

This video shows the full process it took for me to take a mediocre specced Mac Pro 2008 from OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard all the way to macOS 14 and all the bumps in the road along the way.

The second half of the video is dedicated to testing out Sonoma, including benchmarking, running various software and games.

My videos mentioned:

Can you use OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2023? Nearly 15 years later…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vOXRFr8AFC9A

OpenCore & OCLP Explained (OpenCore Legacy Patcher)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vVSF9eCLDpoI

How to install OpenCore Legacy Patcher in 5 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vi4tsltwR2g8

How to play PlayStation 2 Games on your Mac (PS2 emulation on macOS)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?va5kfA6P_DV8

How to play PlayStation 3 Games on your Mac (PS3 emulation on macOS)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v926SGyTUHfc

Mentioned other videos:

Jessie’s Flying: macOS 14 Sonoma on 83 UNSUPPORTED MACs?!? OpenCore Legacy Patcher v1.0.0 is here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v3VB19StEhXg

Links:

4k mystery: Why am I able to output 4k30 over DVI to HDMI via GeForce 760 on a cMP 3,1?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/a-4k-mystery-why-am-i-able-to-output-4k30-over-dvi-to-hdmi-via-geforce-760-on-a-cmp-3-1.2407119/

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2018/05/07/definitive-mac-pro-upgrade-guide.html

Quinn’s Tech Corner Discord (Fellow youtuber’s retro Mac focused discord)
https://discord.gg/bFJw2msg

Easiest Tutorial to instal macOS Sonoma on UNSUPPORTED MACs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?vgmwneF_YsCA

Beer consumed:
Ale Apothecary: Field Spirits. Ale Apothecary is an unusual wild ferment brewery in Bend, Oregon (they have hand made dug out pine trees used as coolships to capture wild yeast). I’ve love their stuff and I was there three weeks ago, and the owner/head brewer recommended that bottle. It’s fantastic, sour, but more tart than anything, that has a bit of the residual fruitiness from the Pinot Noir barrels it was aged in.

https://thealeapothecary.com/
https://untappd.com/b/the-ale-apothecary-field-spirits/3221145

Most people think Oregon and think IPAs, but if you ask me what our best strength is wild ferments/Belgian inspired beers as there’s multiple sour specialists here.