For the next year or so, until the following major version is released, Apple provides a series of 5-7 minor updates which contain a mixture of regular bug and security fixes. Each year, around the autumn/fall, Apple releases a major new version of macOS.

To investigate this, I’ve used the update information which I publish in articles here, checked against those given in Mactracker for full release dates, and the detailed records of individual security updates given by Apple here.įor the sake of clarity, allow me to explain how macOS support currently works.

This article sets out what Apple has actually done over the last few years, from OS X Mavericks onwards. The strange thing about that is Apple doesn’t seem to have committed that to writing, and I’ve searched long and hard for its official policy on many occasions. As far as macOS goes, everyone will tell you that Apple supports the current version for about a year before it’s replaced by a new major release, then provides two years of security updates for it. It’s widely known that Apple supports Mac and other hardware for periods which are laid down in this Support document.

Osx supported versions