I am reluctant and have no real need to upgrade as I am running old design software which works fine and is needed for my work - and the software will not work on a newer OS.
So my question is how long can I keep running this imac on El Capitan? Will things cease to work eventually?
Thank you.
iMac 27″, OS X 10.11
You can go on running it indefinitely - I have Macs running Snow Leopard and Tiger though they're not my main machines - but you will not get any security updates: so you should be very careful about doing anything likely to cause you to download malware. Apps should continue to work, though of course they won't get updates either. However may find it increasingly difficult to access some websites. This shouldn't be too much of a problem at the moment but as time goes on more complicated programming may be difficult for your Mac to handle.
You can run El Capitan on your mac for as long as you like.
This will probably be restricted by the life of any internal components of the mac.
If parts fail you may find that parts are difficult to get hold of or are too expensive
or almost impossible to replace due to the construction of the iMac.
In terms of software you may find already that internet browsers for El Capitan
are not keeping up with the latest security protocols and may experience difficulty
opening certain websites. This may also be true of Mail applications.
Which iMac do you have, what year is it.
It is possible to have a dual boot system whereby you have a more modern OS on the mac
and have El Capitan on an external drive or partition on the internal drive.
That way you can still use your older design software on the internal partition or external
drive with El Capitan, and have a modern OS for other usage.
The model and year of your mac will determine which OS's you may be able to upgrade to.
My ancient Mac Pro runs Mac OS X Lion, Mac OS X El Capitan, macOS Sierra, MacOS High Sierra and macOS Mojave.
How long can I stay on El Capitan?
