Where can I find an end of life schedule for Mac OS's?

Are you looking for the last Mac to support each OS, or something else?

There's not really an "end of life" for an OS. It's really more of a factor of the Mac hardware being able to run an OS. Many Mac users are still using OS 9 as their only OS. OS 9 gradually began to be phased out about 10+ years ago. New Macs of that era could boot OS 9.x or boot OS X, and run OS 9 applications in classic mode. Then, later Macs could only run OS 9 apps in classic mode while booted in OS X. Later, Macs could no longer run classic mode. Today, only Macs with an Intel processor can run Snow Leopard 10.6.

Another end of life factor is browsers. Many browser versions for OS 10.3 & below, don't work on may sites due to Java, Flash, security requirements.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

This Wikipedia article has a fairly detailed history of Mac OS. To the best of my knowledge there is no end of life schedule as such. However, I have been known to be, quite often, mistaken.

😉 cornelius

Not a schedule as such but observation suggests Apple generally only does OS updates for the current and previous OS version. So Apple currently brings out updates for Snow Leopard and Leopard, but not Tiger or older. Panther updates were stopped when Leopard was released.

Other software may continue to support older OS versions. So Snow Leopard was out but iTunes for a while continued to support Tiger while OS updates were no longer being made for Tiger.

[Vintage and obsolete products|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1752]

Message was edited by: Limnos

The best you'll find is the link below. What has been stated is quite accurate. Mac OS X has had security updates included only for the current update, and the last update of the last retail operating system. Various Apple applications have complete to limited compatibility with previous operating systems. For instance iTunes now requires 10.5 or later. Various individual applications may require specific hardware installed as well. To accurately give you an end of life for each operating system, you'd have to include all exceptions.

I hear you. But it doesn't appear anyone has thought it useful to provide such a documentation. http://www.apple.com/feedback/ you may want to suggest it.

I have not seen any chart of that nature for Mac OS versions, and certainly not an official outlook (just a history chart as another poster provided a link for earlier). In theory Apple could come out with an update to OS9 tomorrow, but I don't think anybody is holding their breath.

Here's another article on the history of Mac OSs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historyof_MacOS

There's a timeline chart showing the release/use time of each OS. However, the use of an OS lasts much longer than the release date of the next OS. Apple generally supports (with updates) only the current OS and the prior OS. Sometimes Apple will issue a security update for an OS before the prior OS.

Cheers, Tom 😉

As evidence the End of Life schedule for Mac OS X Tiger is not yet here, Apple has released Safari 4.1.3 for Tiger.