I recommend replacing your Mac, iPhone or iPad on a proactive schedule, rather than waiting for your device to break or fail in some other manner. Here’s why.

The core issue is not performance — it’s security support. When Apple ends operating system updates for a device, that device stops receiving patches for newly discovered vulnerabilities. The hardware continues to function, but the protection behind it has expired. Bad actors will discover and exploit these vulnerabilities so risk increases if you continue to use the Mac, iPhone or iPad.

I understand the instinct to hold onto a device that’s still working. It feels wasteful to replace something that isn’t broken. However, I’d like to share a couple of analogies that I think reframe the issue in an important way.

Think about smoke detectors. Most people don’t replace them because they stop beeping — they replace them because after a certain number of years, the manufacturer can no longer certify that the sensor is reliable. The detector looks the same, sounds the same, and seems perfectly functional. But the support infrastructure behind it has quietly expired. Trusting your family’s safety to it at that point is a hidden risk.

Or consider your passport. You don’t wait for it to physically fall apart before renewing it. It expires on a fixed schedule because the world’s security systems move on, and an out-of-date document simply can’t do the job it needs to do, regardless of how good it looks.

An unsupported device is in the same position. It works, but it is no longer protected against modern threats. In a world where cyberattacks are increasingly sophisticated, that distinction matters significantly.

A related concern is that Macs running older versions of the Mac operating system (macOS), aren’t always able to run current versions of anti-virus applications or web browsers such as Firefox or Google Chrome. This increases the risk. In such a situation the Mac is running a version of macOS that doesn’t get security updates from Apple, might not get security updates for Firefox and can’t run current versions of Sophos Home Anti-Virus for Mac or Malwarebytes. Now there are multiple layers of security vulnerabilities. This situation can be avoided by proactively updating your Mac’s operating system and replacing the Mac as needed.

Your iPhone, iPad, and Mac work the same way. Once Apple stops issuing operating system and security updates for a device, it’s not that the device breaks, it’s that the protection behind it expires. New threats emerge every day, and an unpatched device becomes increasingly vulnerable to them in ways that aren’t always visible until something goes wrong.

Before our Macs were connected to the Internet, a case could be made for using a Mac until it broke or until it no longer met one’s needs. These days, the landscape has changed. Our Macs are used to interact with a variety of websites and other services such as iCloud and Dropbox. The number of online threats, cyberattacks, has significantly increased and they are getting increasingly sophisticated. All of this compels us to shift our mindset. It’s now essential to proactively upgrade the operating system on our devices and proactively replace our Mac, iPhone, or iPad. And don’t forget about updating and replacing one’s router, which I recently covered.

[Image generated using Adobe Firefly.]