Upgrading Macintosh OSX 10.11.6 on MacBook Pro (El Capitan) to the latest version

alphonsebro wrote:

MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012)

As the others have noted, you can upgrade that Mac to Catalina – but no further.

How to download and install macOS - Apple Support

I would suggest making a bootable clone backup of your system, on an external drive, using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!, before doing any macOS upgrade. If something goes wrong, you want to be able to recover; and these days, I'm not sure whether you can always count on Internet Recovery for very old Macs.

Catalina isn't one of the "most recent three" – having fallen off that list in October 2022 when Ventura came out. So upgrading to Catalina will not let be enough to let you run commercial applications from the likes of Microsoft and Adobe. Or to get you the current version of Safari.

Catalina is still good enough to run current versions of

• The Firefox web browser
• The LibreOffice office suite
• The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)
• The commercial Affinity V2 applications (Photo, Designer, Publisher)
• The backup utilities CCC v6 (not current, but still supported) and SuperDuper!

Those may let you get a bit more life out of that old Mac.

The downside to upgrading to Catalina is that it breaks 32-bit applications. If you have many of those, you may want to keep an external drive with El Capitan or High Sierra around so that you can dual-boot to, e.g., play old games.

A mid 2012 MBP can update as far as macOS 10.15 Catalina.

click here ➜ macOS Catalina is compatible with these computers - Apple Support

You can download the installer from the following support document.

click here ➜ How to download and install macOS - Apple Support

Do note, any 32 bit apps you may still have, will not work on Catalan anymore. So make sure you have replacements or updates available for any apps you need to continue using.

click here ➜ https://www.macworld.com/article/232735/how-to-check-if-mac-software-is-32-or-64-bit.html

that Mac can run up to macOS 10.15 Catalina, but don't be in a rush to do so.

These next versions of macOS re-arrange the disk drive structure, and may be slightly more perilous than usual. Be sure you have a Trusted, current BACKUP on hand before proceeding to 10.14 Mojave, which uses the more modern Metal drawing system.

The next step, to 10.15 Catalina, may be an even bigger shock, because many older macOS utilities will NOT be supported under Catalina. only 64-bit version are supported. To help you find these the free utility Go64 is available here:

https://www.stclairsoft.com/Go64/index.html

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The versions you seek should be available to you through the Mac App Store. However, they are "Put Away" so that users do not download them by accident. To get an App Store download, use the links in this article:

How to download and install macOS - Apple Support

NB>> if you have a WORKING MacOS, using the full features inside that older version to obtain a newer Mac App Store version are almost ALWAYS the best way to proceed, rather than trying more convoluted methods such as recovery mode or bootable USB sticks.

EDIT: Phil0124's excellent advice was not showing when I started to compose. Nothing I wrote is intended to diminish what was said in any way.

alphonsebro wrote:

My major concern is the Mac OSX and Office for Mac which I mostly use.

With regards to Microsoft Office,

• Current versions of Microsoft 365/Office will only install on macOS Ventura or higher. So there's no way to use them on your MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012).
• There are reports on these forums that Microsoft has shut off DRM activation servers for some old Mac versions of Office. This means that if you ever move from one old Mac to another – or even do a "clean" reinstallation on the same Mac – your copy of Office breaks.

A Mac running El Capitan is unlikely to be able to update all the way to the current latest macOS version: macOS 15 Sequoia.

It may be possible to update to a newer macOS version than El Capitan, but we would need to know the model / year of the Mac to determine that.

You can find the model / year in Apple Menu ➜ About this Mac.

Just for reference: Mac OS X (El Capitan) still using the HFS+ file system (also called Mac OS Extended), it’s until macOS Sierra that Apple introduced the apfs (Apple File System) which is based on images of volumes and not in partitions of the physical drive.

On my personal experience I recommend that you first upgrade to macOS High Sierra and make sure to install all updates and security updates until the final release (10.13.6) and make sure you have a reliable backup of all your data and convert your hard drive volume(s) to apfs, this to ensure proceeding to a more newer version of macOS with easy and don’t loosing any data, this because at some point installing newer versions of macOS can inadvertently convert all your hard drive partitions to apfs volumes, so better if you have control on what drives you wish to migrate because this process can occasionally damage some data on your hard drive.

If you have more that one partition on your hard drive, you’ll still be able to mount compatible file system formats, but if you’re not using any other OS other than Mac, is more useful and secure converting to apfs volumes an encrypt this volumes to have more security but don’t loose your key from FileVault because you’ll not be able to decrypt an apfs volume, also apfs volumes can’t be mount on other OS like Linux, Windows, etc., for now.

If your Microsoft Office installation breaks and you cannot re-install it on Catalina, you can download LibreOffice.

It's a full suite of office apps like Microsoft Office and it's free. Catalina is however, the oldest macOS version it supports.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/

There are old versions of LibreOffice available for versions of macOS older than Catalina. These versions of LibreOffice are no longer supported, but they are still available, unlike old versions of Office.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/System_Requirements#LibreOffice_on_other_OSes