Mac OS Support Life-Cycle

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Mac OS Support Life-Cycle

Has Apple published any information about their support life-cycle for their operating systems? Does someone have a link?

Thanks.

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Oct 15, 2009 7:34 AM

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Answer 1

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Oct 15, 2009 8:34 AM in response to GeekZilla

I'm not sure I understand completely what you're asking, but try this:

http://www.apple.com/support/service/

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Answer 2

GeekZilla Author

Level 1

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Oct 15, 2009 9:00 AM in response to thomas_r.

Thanks for the link Thomas, but not exactly what I was looking for.

The Support Lifecycle of a software product is the period of time between when the software is released and when all support for it ends. Support generally includes bug fixes, security updates and email and telephone technical assistance. Eventually this all comes to an end, of course. Continuing to support all the iterations of a software product takes money and the ROI is less and less because fewer customers are using the older products.

Microsoft does a good job of spelling out their software support lifecycle. See this link as an example of what I am hoping to find from Apple:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

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Answer 3

varjak paw

Level 10

170,200 points

Oct 15, 2009 9:05 AM in response to GeekZilla

Apple has not, to my knowledge, published any official support lifecycle information for their software.

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Answer 4

Tuttle

Level 7

29,541 points

Oct 15, 2009 9:08 AM in response to varjak paw

Unofficial info is here. ; )

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Answer 5

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Oct 15, 2009 9:10 AM in response to GeekZilla

I am not aware of any such publications, but Apple is pretty good about continuing to support older products. My old Tiger (10.4) machines are still getting security updates periodically. Of course, that does not mean that they are going to release any further updates to Tiger itself or will guarantee that newer versions of other software (like iLife, iWork, etc) will continue to work with Tiger, and certainly no new machine will run any version of the system older than what it shipped with. I can't say when phone or in-store support might cease... I don't generally need Apple support much.

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Answer 6

a brody

Level 10

82,841 points

Oct 15, 2009 10:43 AM in response to GeekZilla

http://www.info.apple.com/usen/legacy/

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