Some Macs are getting fewer updates than they used to. Here’s why it’s a problem

What the data says

Before we look at charts, here are some highlights from our data that are more difficult to visualize:

• For all Mac models tracked, the average Mac receives almost exactly seven years of new macOS updates from the time it is introduced, plus another two years of security-only updates that fix vulnerabilities but don't add new features.
• The average Mac receives updates for about 5.5 years after Apple stops selling it. Buying a Mac toward the end of its life cycle means getting significantly fewer updates.
• Macs that are sold for an abnormally long time—the 2014 Mac mini that was available until 2018, the 2013 Mac Pro that was available until 2019, or the 2015 MacBook Air that was available until 2019, to pick three examples that Ventura doesn't support—don't get software updates for longer just because Apple sold them for longer. This differs from the timeline Apple uses to provide hardware repair services, which is determined based on "when Apple last distributed the product for sale."
• The three longest-lived Macs were the mid-2007 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros, the mid-2010 Mac Pro, and the mid-2007 iMac, which received new macOS updates for around nine years after they were introduced (and security updates for around 11 years).
• The shortest-lived Mac is the late 2008 version of the white MacBook, which only received 2.7 years of new macOS updates and another 3.3 years of security updates from the time it was introduced. (Late PowerPC-era and early Intel-era Macs are all generally pretty bad by modern standards).

To determine whether Mac update support had improved or declined over time, we organized all Macs by release year and calculated averages of how long that year's Macs had received new macOS versions and, after that, new security updates.

We paid attention to the number of years each Mac was supported (rather than the number of macOS releases that each Mac received) to account for shifts in Apple's release strategy, from "whenever-they're-done" major macOS releases in the 2000s to the current once-per-year release model that started in the early 2010s. Macs in the early-to-mid 2000s may have gotten as few as two or three macOS version updates, but because macOS went longer between major version updates, those Macs received active software support for about as many years as later models that received five or six macOS version updates.

Our data shows some pretty clear trends for macOS updates. Support time took a major dip for a few years as the PowerPC era ended and the Intel era began, between roughly 2004 and 2007. This reflects all the big under-the-hood changes that went with that transition and is made even more complicated by a simultaneous shift from entirely-32-bit to entirely-64-bit hardware and software. But after that, Macs received updates for even longer than before, peaking for Macs released between 2009 and 2013.

That peak occurred at least in part because Apple didn't drop any Macs from its support list between the release of version 10.8 (Mountain Lion) in 2012 and version 10.11 (El Capitan) in 2015. Apple dropped some Macs in 2016 when version 10.12 (Sierra) came out, and it began requiring Metal-capable GPUs in 2018 with version 10.14 (Mojave). But things accelerated in 2020 with macOS 11 (Big Sur), when Apple began dropping support for a few older Macs every single year.

This has led to a gradual decline in the amount of time that Macs could expect to get new macOS releases, but the amount of software support was well within the normal historical range for Macs released in 2014 and 2015. Ventura changes that for Macs released in 2016, in particular. Those models are getting new macOS updates for less than six years from their release date, the least since 2006 and a year or two less than Mac owners could expect in the very recent past. It's not a historical low, but it's a noticeable step backward.

Whether this dip for 2016 Macs is an aberration or a precursor to another 2004-to-2006-style sustained drop in support time depends on Apple; if the system requirements for macOS 14 are the same as the requirements for Ventura, support time could return to being on the low end of "normal" for the Macs lucky enough to run Ventura this year. If Apple continues to drop Macs from the list every year, late-era Intel Macs could end up being as short-lived as some of the final PowerPC Macs.

Measuring support from the time each Mac was discontinued shows us a trendline with the same basic shape as before: a sustained drop during the transition to Intel and a sustained increase once Intel Macs were well-established—but with a more pronounced decrease in support for Intel Macs released in and after 2014. Sometimes, Apple will keep older hardware around as entry-level models after introducing a significant hardware redesign, like it did with 2012's non-Retina MacBook Pros, 2015's Intel MacBook Air, or (most recently) 2020's M1 MacBook Air. Buying those Macs can save you some money in the short term, but you need to weigh the savings against the likelihood that you could stop getting macOS updates a year or two earlier than if you bought brand-new, just-launched hardware.

Explaining the acceleration (or trying to)

Frustrating as it might be for people who bought these systems in 2017 or 2018, Apple does probably have a technical leg to stand on when it comes to dropping support for Macs made in 2013, 2014, or 2015.

One issue for older Macs is driver support. You might not think of macOS as having "drivers" in the sense that Windows does because most of them are packaged as part of OS updates, and users can't really do anything to tweak or update them independently. But your Mac's GPU, networking hardware, and all kinds of other chipset-and-controller-related hardware need drivers just like any other OS. You'll catch references to them in macOS's release notes sometimes, when updates add support for new GPU models.

Apple is at least partially dependent on third-party companies to give that driver support, and those third parties don't provide driver support for their hardware in perpetuity. Using Intel's Windows graphics drivers as a reference point, the newest version supporting the Intel GPUs used in 2013-to-2015-era Macs dates back to February of 2021 and only provides a single security update. The story is similar for the AMD GPUs in the 2013 Mac Pro and in iMacs and MacBook Pros from that era—on the Windows side, they've been moved to AMD's "legacy" driver support model, which means they're not getting major new features or supporting new OSes like Windows 11.

If Apple can't get active driver support, it can have a big impact on the potential stability of those computers, since buggy drivers can cause everything from hangs to crashes to power management problems. Will older drivers generally work OK in newer versions of macOS? Sure. People use Windows 10 drivers in Windows 11, and people patch old drivers back into macOS to run newer software versions on unsupported Macs. But those drivers may cause just enough problems that Apple doesn't want to deal with continuing to support those older Macs officially.

Security is also a consideration. Some security issues need to be fixed at the firmware or microcode level to work around lower-level vulnerabilities that macOS updates can't fix. Apple has a big advantage over Microsoft here since it directly controls firmware updates for all Macs, and many PCs require users to seek out, download, and install BIOS updates manually (when they even get BIOS updates for more than a year or two after they're released, which many don't). But as with drivers, CPU vendors don't issue these kinds of firmware-level security updates in perpetuity.

Intel doesn't keep an exact list of all the CPUs it is actively providing security patches for—the company tells us that it's working on one but that it's not ready yet. However, the company's Software Security Guidance document of "currently supported Intel products" that reaches back to 2018 doesn't list any 4th- or 5th-generation Intel Core CPUs, the chips that power most 2013-to-2015 Macs. (The Ivy Bridge EP chips in the 2013 Mac Pro don't make an appearance, either). Apple frequently plays up its commitment to security; it's possible that these computers can no longer be secured to Apple's liking and that it views that as one reason to nudge people in the direction of newer hardware.

A decade ago, it was definitely more common to consider a computer's performance and capabilities when defining system requirements, not driver or firmware security. But in the last few years, firmware and CPU-level vulnerabilities have been discovered with some regularity, raising threats that can be partially addressed with software updates but which need firmware- or microcode-level patches to be fully mitigated. Windows 11 has security requirements so strict that they render the performance-based system requirements totally irrelevant—if you have the hardware to meet the security requirements, it's almost impossible not to meet the performance requirements.

These technical explanations might be incorrect. The version where Apple wants to sell new hardware and wants to accelerate the end of the Intel era could be the "right" answer, and there are some Macs that Ventura doesn't support that the technical explanations don't seem to cover (more on that later). But it's at least possible that Apple has a better reason for dropping these Macs and the company is just declining to tell anyone about it (more on that later, too).

Are security updates for old macOS versions enough?

When Macs stop running the latest version of macOS, they can typically expect another two years of security updates for whatever macOS version they're stuck on—Apple provides these updates to accommodate both users of older hardware and people who don't want to switch to a new macOS version right away.

One problem with these updates, as we've written previously, is that Apple doesn't actually patch security holes in older macOS versions as promptly as it patches them in the latest version. Joshua Long of the Mac Security Blog has tracked this problem for some time now—in multiple instances, bugs affecting multiple "supported" versions of macOS have been patched out of the most recent version first, leaving older versions vulnerable for weeks or months.

For Macs that can, the best way to stay secure is simply to update to the latest macOS version whether you have issues with it or not. But for the handful of Macs that get dropped from the latest macOS version every year, it's often unfortunately a step down to second-class security update support.

The other problem with the security-update-only model is that Apple tends to develop its software ecosystem based on the assumption that most people are running all the newest software on all their devices at any given point in time. Most macOS and iOS versions add new features to Notes, Messages, Photos, or other iCloud-connected apps and services that will only work on the latest OS versions. In the case of Ventura and iOS 16, one such feature is the ability to edit and unsend recently sent iMessages. On Ventura and iOS 16 devices, users will be notified when messages have been unsent or edited. But Monterey and iOS 15 have no way to handle these notifications—edited messages will just show up as separate messages, and unsent messages won't disappear as they will on newer OS versions.

Apple also cuts off app support for older versions of macOS very quickly. The current versions of Keynote, Pages, and Numbers require macOS Big Sur, even though Catalina is still ostensibly supported (Final Cut, Motion, and Compressor do still support Catalina as of this writing). The Xcode development environment requires a very recent version of macOS to run. Safari updates stop when security updates do, even though alternatives like Chrome, Firefox, or Edge will run on much older macOS versions.

Running an older macOS version doesn't automatically make your Mac a paperweight, but by the time you reach the end of your security update allotment, most of Apple's software and services will have left your Mac behind. If more of Apple's apps were developed and maintained independently of the OS they were running on, it would be less of a problem, but that just isn't Apple's development model.

Why should I care about this?

OK, we've established that Apple is providing less software support for Macs than it was a few years ago, and we've shown that Macs that are no longer getting updates are demoted to a less-usable, less-secure version of the Mac experience. But who cares? Are people really using computers for more than five or six years? Aren't the benefits of Apple Silicon—better performance, less heat and fan noise, lower power usage and phenomenal battery life—worth upgrading for, anyway?

Anyone with a 2013 or 2016-era Mac who updates to one of the latest M1 and M2 Macs will immediately notice the benefit, it's true. But it's also true that Macs can have a long life even after their primary owner is done with them. Macs retain their resale value much better than most PCs, and even decade-old Macs still sell for several hundred dollars on eBay when they're in good condition. I also know at least four people who currently use Macs made between 2012 and 2015 for their everyday work—Macs they've held on to for years because they've kept working fine or Macs they were given by friends or employers who were upgrading themselves.

Does Apple have an obligation to update Macs for as long as any one person is using them? No, of course not, especially when driver problems or security issues make those Macs less safe to use or work less reliably. But computers just don't get better at the same rate that they used to, and these mid-2010s-vintage Macs are still just about as good at running Chrome, Office, Slack, Discord, and Zoom as modern Macs are. The usable life of these machines should be staying the same or getting longer, not shrinking.

There's also an environmental argument. Apple's own environmental reports for its products show that the vast majority of the emissions that each Mac is responsible for is emitted during manufacture and transport—the 2016 MacBook Pro's report is here (PDF), the M2 MacBook Air's is here (PDF), just to show some examples. Those numbers will shift some the longer the products are used (Apple assumes "a four-year period of power use by first owners"), but so much of a Mac's emissions are made when the device is manufactured that it's not carbon neutral to replace any old Mac with a brand new one (buying a newer but still used Mac can help limit the environmental impact, though you'll be getting fewer years of software support).

Measuring the environmental impact of any piece of consumer electronics equipment is tricky. But the short version, as summed up in this extensive Wirecutter article on the topic, is that the best thing you can do for the environment is to use your computer for as many years as you reasonably can before replacing it. When Apple pulls back on the number of software updates it provides for a given Mac, it makes it harder to keep using it.

Things Apple can do

Fortunately, the fewer-updates problem can be addressed with a little effort. Here are three suggestions we'd make to Apple to make sure that it does right by Intel Mac owners as the Apple Silicon transition continues.

Add support for Skylake Macs to Ventura

It may be inevitable that the last of the Intel Macs will get fewer updates than models released at the height of the Intel era in the early 2010s. But one thing would almost immediately fix that chart showing that newer Intel Macs are being supported for less time than older Intel Macs: add support for Macs with 6th-generation Core processors to Ventura.

Codenamed Skylake, 6th-gen Intel Core processors were used in Macs from late 2015 all the way through 2016: the late 2015 27-inch iMacs, the early 2016 12-inch MacBook, and all 2016 MacBook Pros. Even if Apple dropped support for these Macs in the very next macOS release, the extra year of support would bring Apple's macOS update timelines back in line with historical precedent.

It's also worth stressing that while there are at least mildly compelling reasons for dropping support for older 4th- and 5th-gen Intel CPUs in Ventura, as best we can tell, those reasons don't really extend to most of the Skylake-based Macs. Intel still provides graphics driver updates and new microcode updates for all Skylake processors and integrated GPUs, while AMD still provides modern drivers for the dedicated Radeon Pro 400-series GPUs in the 2016 MacBook Pros (the Radeon R9 300 GPUs from the 2015 iMacs, admittedly, has been moved to AMD's legacy driver support model, so it could be more of a stretch).

The performance and feature gap between 6th-generation (unsupported) and 7th-generation (supported) Intel chips is also very small; 7th-generation chips increased clock speeds somewhat, and their GPUs included better support for encoding and decoding 4K video. Architecturally, though, the chips are nearly identical due to the problems Intel was having getting its next-generation manufacturing process off the ground at the time—some version of the Skylake architecture was included in 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th-generation Intel chips, and the 6th and 7th generations are especially similar. The Radeon Pro 500-series GPUs in the 2017 MacBook Pros are the same way, providing nigh-imperceptible improvements to the architecturally similar 400-series GPUs in the 2016 models.

Even moving down to more granular system components, iFixit teardowns for the 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pros reveal that these models are virtually identical in every way: the same Apple T1 chip, the same Intel Thunderbolt controllers, the same Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules, and even the same power management controllers and NAND flash chips.

For the 2016 MacBooks and MacBook Pros in particular, I can't identify a compelling reason why Ventura wouldn't run just as well on them as it does on the 2017 models. It's possible that Ventura would run just fine on them with absolutely no additional drivers or model-specific effort from Apple because their CPUs and GPUs are so similar and they're supported by the same drivers. Absent some alternate explanation that Apple won't give me or anyone else, there's just no compelling technical reason not to support these Macs.

Extend security updates for older Macs

Apple dropped support for a fairly large number of iPhones and iPads in the move from iOS 12 to iOS 13, including the iPhone 5S, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the first-gen iPad Air, and two generations of iPad mini. But then, with little fanfare, Apple did something it had never done for older iDevices before: it continued to provide iOS 12 security updates specifically for those older devices, releasing them nearly in lockstep with iOS 13 and iOS 14 updates over the next two years.

Two years' worth of ongoing security updates is already Apple's standard practice for old macOS versions, so in that sense, the iOS 12 situation isn't remarkable on the Mac side. But if Apple really does want to wind down the Intel versions of macOS quickly, it could at least commit to a longer tail of security-only updates for the last few Intel-supporting macOS releases. This could help protect Intel Mac users who aren't yet ready to upgrade their machines while also freeing Apple from the burden of continuing to add and support new macOS features across multiple processor architectures.

Better communication about updates

Whatever Apple does, the company could help end users, IT workers, and security professionals by improving how it communicates about updates.

Right now, Apple is tight-lipped about virtually everything regarding the way it supports macOS. We can assume yearly updates because Apple has released them that frequently in the past, and we assume that each macOS version will get around two years of security updates because that's how Apple has handled it in the past. But Apple carefully avoids publishing "end of support" dates for any of its software products, unlike Microsoft. You can't be sure when your device will stop getting security updates or what patches it will be missing when support ends. And every time Apple announces a new version of macOS, Apple risks surprising some subset of Mac users by dropping their hardware from the support list without warning.

Apple is secretive about its future plans, even compared to other tech companies; it's baked into the company's communications strategy, and it's clearly not going to change. Maintaining a veil of secrecy around unannounced products is justifiable for a publicly traded company that is trying to get and keep a leg up on its competitors. Maintaining that same veil of secrecy around software update timelines for five-year-old devices makes way less sense.

Right now, Apple is refusing to communicate anything about its software support timeline, and it's ending support for older Intel Macs years earlier than it was in the very recent past. Apple needs to fix at least one of these problems, lest owners of late-Intel-era Macs come away feeling burned.

Update: An earlier version of this piece didn't accurately describe how older operating systems will handle edited and unsent iMessages from Ventura or iOS 16; that description has been corrected.

Notes on data collection

• We treat each Mac model identifier as a separate device, even if they were introduced, discontinued, and dropped from support at exactly the same time. This happened with many generations of 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs, 21- and 27-inch iMacs, and others.
• Some models could be upgraded beyond their normal life cycles using upgrades or software workarounds, like installing a CPU upgrade, disabling installer compatibility checks, or using patching tools or alternate bootloaders. For consistency's sake, we're using official support dates for unmodified hardware and software, since that is what a typical user would experience.
• When calculating the length of time each OS was supported with security updates, we used the date of the last regularly released Security Update for each OS, as listed on Apple's Security Updates page. Some OSes received updated versions of iTunes and Safari for a bit longer, or received limited one-off fixes after regular updates had dried up; we didn't count these. We also don't count additions to Apple's behind-the-scenes XProtect malware blacklist, which periodically gets new updates on Macs going all the way back to El Capitan (10.11).
• Some models continued to be sold to educational institutions for a while after they were discontinued for everyone else. We're using the dates they were discontinued for the public, as listed on EveryMac. We also didn't include models sold exclusively to educational institutions, like mid-2009 iMac.
• The "eMac," a cheaper CRT alternative to the LCD iMac G4, is included with the other iMacs.
• Some models received a mid-cycle refresh that bumped individual specs but didn't change the model identifier. For those systems, we used the date that the first revision was introduced and the date that the last revision was discontinued, since macOS makes no distinction between them.
• We didn't count Xserve server hardware.
• For Macs that can't run Ventura but are running a currently supported macOS version (as of this writing, Catalina, Big Sur, and Monterey), we've extrapolated end-of-support dates based on Apple's standard practice of providing security updates to all macOS versions for two years after they are replaced. The actual dates may vary by a month or two.

Listing image by Aurich Lawson