It shouldn’t surprise you to know that Apple is exercising restraint when it comes to supporting older versions of macOS. In 2026, only three versions of macOS are supported by Apple with regular updates, namely: 14, Sonoma; 15, Sequoia; and 26, Tahoe. macOS 13, Ventura, saw its last security update in August 2025, and support is generally considered to be over. As expected from the company, no end-of-life date has been clearly announced, with users expected to upgrade to the next version once it is released.
Next on the chopping block should be Sonoma, which will likely follow the pattern seen by those who document end-of-life dates, such as the website endoflife.date. Golden Gate is expected to launch this fall, and using Apple’s discontinuation model, Sonoma is expected to stop receiving updates next year. This would bring the total lifespan of each version of macOS to around three years.
What looks like discrepancies in the data is actually the fact that Apple has addressed undisclosed security issues, such as with a sudden update of the long-dead Catalina (15) and Big Sur (11) in 2026, to ensure that users still on these platforms are not vulnerable to malicious attacks. While Apple would like people to ditch their old hardware, as with the final phaseout of all Intel devices this year, users aren’t going to so suddenly abandon the very expensive computer they purchased relatively recently. Protecting them is always important in the grand scheme of things.
The longest support for Apple’s operating system dates back to 1993
On average, Apple has only really provided a few years of support for each operating system. The Apple II is a major exception, in that ProDOS was released in 1983 and was supported until 1993, coincidentally just as Apple IIs were beginning to disappear from shelves in favor of the lesser-known Apple fare of the 1990s. Mac OS 9, the version before the move to OS X, now macOS, was given a public funeral at WWDC 2002 by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Updates had stopped a year ago.
In comparison, Microsoft, being deeply integrated into almost every aspect of business life, has a much wider support window for Windows. This was also the case for previous versions, but Microsoft has reduced support for its operating system with the end of Windows 10 in 2025. The company supports each Windows update for about two years, but the overall operating system is expected to last as long as previous versions, with an estimated life cycle of ten years.
Not to be outdone, Linux may have a longer tail than the one above. Although each version brings new additions in distributions like Ubuntu, the “LTS” or Long Term Support provides a stable version updated every two years, but with five years of security updates and an extended shelf life of “Extended Security Maintenance” until 2036 for version 26.04. Some distributions, like Arch, drop the previous version immediately after updating due to its “rolling release” structure.
