I am running the Sierra beta on a late 2012 Mac mini with essentially the same quad core i7 processor running 2.6 GHz and it is running fine. Admittedly I have 16 GB of RAM and an OWC Mercury SSD that have a significant impact on system performance. I realize that benchmark tests are designed to test the hardware and really do not reflect software performance, but the overall scores from three different benchmark suites show no statistically significant change between running MacOS 12 public beta 6 and El Capitan. Empirically I would say that my system feels a touch faster with Sierra than it did with El Capitan, but that could all be between the headsets.

There are probably be some relatively esoteric features that are dependent on some hardware functions that are not available in our CPU and therefore are force to run in software rather than hardware, and would be slower. On the other hand, as with most upgrades of OS X/Mac OS, there are low level functions which have become far more efficient and often more than offset any speed loss from additional feature load.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein