Aurich Lawson
When macOS Ventura was announced earlier this month, its system requirements were significantly stricter than those of macOS Monterey, which was released just eight months ago at the time of writing. Ventura requires a Mac manufactured in 2017 or later, dropping support for a wide range of Monterey-supported Mac models released between 2013 and 2016.
This certainly seems more aggressive than new macOS releases just a few years ago, where the system requirements would tighten up roughly every year or so. But how bad is it really? Does a Mac purchased in 2016 get fewer updates than one purchased in 2012, 2008, or 1999? And if so, is there an explanation beyond Apple wanting more users to switch to shiny new Apple Silicon Macs?
Using data from Apple’s website and EveryMac.com, we’ve collected information on more than two decades of Mac releases—pretty much everything Apple released between the original iMac in late 1998 and the latest Intel Macs in 2020. We recorded when each model released , when Apple stopped selling each model, the last officially supported release of macOS for each system, and the dates those versions of macOS received their last point updates (ie 10.4.11, 11.6) and their last regular security fixes. (I made some notes about how I chose to streamline and organize the data, which I put at the end of this article).
The end result is a spreadsheet filled with dozens of Macs, with multiple metrics to determine how long each has received official software support from Apple. These methods involve measuring the time between when each model was discontinued and when it stopped receiving updates, which is especially important for models like the 2013 Mac Pro, 2014 Mac mini, and 2015 MacBook Air, which have been sold for several years after they were first introduced.
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