ok, so i did an experiment. i dualbooted my 2012 MBP, with it's original OS. OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. mostly because i wanted to try it and also because i want to run a few apps on there that modern macOS no longer works with.

and holy hell, is it FAST!

i know some people who just don't update their Mac's ever, and keep them on the OG OS, and they might be on to something. on 10.8 boot time is literally at most 7 seconds, from the point of pressing the power button. anything i click opens lightning fast, there are no beach balls, it boots up so fast the spinning circle below the apple logo doesn't even appear.

now this is expected, this MBP originally shipped with 500gb of spinning rust and 4gb of ram. it now has a 500GB 850 EVO (120gb allocated to 10.8, the rest to Catalina) and 16gb of ram. so i'd expect it to be fast as hell but not this fast. it's almost addicting how speedy it is. i'm used to it taking a second to load system preferences but on 10.8 it's just instant.

i might try to see how much i can get done on 10.8, of what i normally do on my Mac so i can use it like that a lot.. a bunch of my tasks should be easy to do on 10.8 since i don't need modern software for it. things like email, youtube, old games, spotify (i often listen to music while reading through inbox) should all still work on 10.8... maybe not totally secure but like, nothing i do is mission critical and i'll put an antivirus on it. this is gonna be fun to experiment with.