Installing MacOS Monterey on 2015 Macbook Pro

In this post, I will share my first impressions about installing and using MacOS Monterey on my 2015 MacBook Pro. This post is a part of my planned series about making upgrades to computers in the household.

Upgrades to my 2015 Macbook Pro

The series of updates/ upgrades I was making to my 2015 Macbook Pro is complete. Over the past few months, I did the following: a. Replace battery b. Replace speakers (new ones are not OEM, are a bit tinny but they work well!) c. Use a NVME adapter to install a 512 GB M2 drive, later upgraded to a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda. d. Upgrade to MacOs Monterrey

First Impressions – MacOS Monterrey

I had written this on LowEndSpirit Forum – posting here since that discussion may get buried soon. Also find my ‘mini review’ on battery life that I posted on Producthunt. Literally comparing Apples and Oranges (pun intended) based on upgrading the OS to Monterey on 2015 MBP. This is the oldest MBP which is officially supported. I like that the MBP got 2 more years this way. Based on the below can only expect a cracker of performance on the M1 Pro/Max.

• Runs faster – apps opening, responsiveness with 15 FF tabs open- no lag
• Battery life seems to have improved. After 3 hours of “Normal everyday use” fully charged Battery – level down to 62% . Graph: https://ibb.co/kyP6VVJ (100% charged nearly 10 hours ago)
• CPU / battery / disk seem to run cooler, haven’t heard the fan go off even once. (I have a TB of NVMe SSD – on Bug Sur it used to cause some heating issues). Haven’t heard the fan go off even once.
• Will give it some “real world” applications test – Audio editing, Zoom Call, etc… to see what it does. Maybe run a batch process to compress a group of @ 1,000 files I imported form my iphone