Breathe new life into your old Mac

Does your Mac sigh when it starts or creak when it calculates? We're here to help Written

- Carrie Marshall

With the weekly shop costing more than a car and everything from energy to entertainment suppliers charging eye-watering prices, many of us are choosing to hang on to our Macs for a little bit longer. And that’s a wise choice, because with a little bit of TLC, Macs can last for a very long time. With some Macs, inexpensive hardware upgrades can deliver a serious speed boost – and with all Macs, a bit of tinkering and a few alternative apps can make a massive difference too.

It’s important to be realistic, of course. macOS Ventura won’t run on a Power Mac G4 and you won’t get M2-beating performance from the 667MHz processor of a 2006 aluminium MacBook Pro. But pretty much any Mac of relatively recent vintage can be tweaked, given extra storage and in many cases given more memory too.

In this feature, we’ll breathe new life into all kinds of Macs. We’ll discover how to safely install the macOS versions Apple doesn’t want your Mac to run, and we’ll also take a look at the apps you can use if Apple’s own apps are no longer being updated for your system – in most cases, without you having to spend any money at all. And we’ll discover the tools you can use to access files from longgone apps too.