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As the Intel Mac era has come to an end over the past few years, we’ve been diligently tracking the amount of software support each outgoing model receives. We did this to determine, with over 20 years of hard data, whether Intel Mac owners are failing as Apple shifts its focus to Apple Silicon hardware and to software that leverages Apple Silicon’s exclusive capabilities.

So far, we’ve found that owners of Intel Macs made in the mid-to-late 2010s definitely get fewer major macOS updates and fewer years of security updates than owners of Intel Macs made in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but that these systems still received more generous support than the old PowerPC Macs after Apple switched to Intel processors.

The good news with the macOS 15 Sequoia release is that Apple is phasing out very few Intel Mac models this year, a much-needed break that slows the steady acceleration of support drops we’ve seen over the past few macOS releases.

The bad news is that is not true of the MacBook Air, by and large the most important and best-selling of all Apple’s Mac models—the 2018 version of the Air (and a lot a slightly revised 2019-era variant of the same machine) are dropped from Sequoia’s support list, giving them the shortest support window of any MacBook Air since the first in 2008.

And the uncertainty of being an Intel Mac owner in the age of Apple Silicon continues, as we don’t know exactly when Apple plans to completely remove Intel support from macOS. Statistically speaking, it could go the other way too – at least a few Intel Macs might get another update, but the Sequoia could also be the end of the line.

The data

If you haven’t read our articles on Intel Mac support in macOS 13 Ventura or macOS 14 Sonoma, here’s a quick overview of what data we collect and what it means. You can also view the raw data in a spreadsheet here; the notes at the end of our macOS Ventura support article have some details about data collection.

For every modern Mac Apple has released—where “modern” includes any model released since the original iMac, shortly after Steve Jobs returned to the company—we’ve tracked the date it was introduced and the date it was discontinued. We also recorded the number of major versions of macOS supported by each system, as well as the amount of time each Mac received security-only major fixes after it stopped being able to run the latest version of macOS.

We primarily focus on two time periods: from the date each Mac was introduced to the date it stopped receiving major macOS updates, and from the date each Mac was introduced to the date it stopped receiving any updates at all. We consider every Mac in any of these ranges to be actively supported; Macs that no longer receive regular updates from Apple have been deprecated and will slowly become less secure and less compatible with modern applications over time. We measure in years of support, not number of releases, which controls Apple’s transition to a once-a-year release schedule for macOS in early 2010.

We also tracked the time between when each Mac model was suspended and when it stopped receiving updates. This is how Apple decides what products go on its “old” and “obsolete” hardware lists, which determine the level of hardware support and the types of repairs the company will provide.

Apple has occasionally suggested that we also use these “old” and “deprecated” labels to choose which Macs are supported by a new macOS update and which are not. But our data shows that’s not true—Apple doesn’t support Mac hardware for longer simply because the company has sold that hardware for longer. If you buy an older Mac, whether new, refurbished, or used, you’re also typically buying fewer years of active macOS updates.