My laptop is running 10.7.x. I want to use the Apple Messages app because I hate sending text messages from my phone when I’m already sitting in front of a full size keyboard.
Is it possible to do this without upgrading to Mavericks? I keep finding websites that claim it’s possible, but then they link to some page that just ends up back at the “install Mavericks” page.
I don’t think so. It appears that the final Messages build requires at least 10.8
Is there any reason you haven’t upgraded to 10.8? It’s superior to 10.7 in every way.
I’m pretty cautious about upgrading my OS.
You never know what kind of incompatibility or issue is going to show up. A few years ago I had to spend about 15 hours and over $100 rebuying software and and reinstalling the OS (twice!) after I hit some perfect storm of incompatibility. Not worth the risk in my opinion.
Just a few weeks ago my Mom upgraded Mavericks and now there’s something wrong with its memory management that I’m still trying to track down. It’s paging a lot and very slow.
I’m sure there are lots of cool features in later versions, but there are risks in changing such a complicated system, too.
It is likely that the app will be built against, minimally, the new versions of the system libraries, and there may be new OS level interfaces that it needs as well. I would say there is little to no chance it would run even if you could find a way to get a stand alone copy.
I agree about waiting for a new version to settle down before installing. I only upgraded a week ago. It has settled down, and I have had no issues, and it is indeed a superior OS version.
The last couple of upgrades to OSX have been more about increased stability and performance than wizzy new features, and they have been pretty happy experiences. It was when they removed Rosetta support that everyone got upset, because old PowerPC only applications ceased to work. That wasn’t caused by problems in the new OS, it was caused by an explicit choice by Apple to delete a feature.
The question of constantly paging and being slow sounds like there is an application that is badly busted. Mavericks adds a new feature to its memory management - compression of in memory data, and this generally reduces paging - and gives you the effect of a significant increase in apparent memory. It may be that on systems with limited memory it gets into a pathological state. Check the memory use with the activity monitor - and see if there is an application that is chewing a lot of memory, or if there is something else odd. Firefox is the usual culprit for generally leaking memory, but this sounds different.
Yeah, I did that, and there are no applications taking up significant memory. In fact, the total amount of memory in use by applications is less than 1G, on a system with 4G of RAM. Yet, memory is full and the swap file is being used, and the damn beachball is a-spinning at every turn.