Deprecation

Deprecation describes technology that may still be in use, but has been superseded by a newer release, leading to discouragement from its continued ongoing use.

Deprecation at Apple
For consumers, Apple's support policy will identify discontinued hardware products as "vintage" after 5 years, indicating that support is being phased out. After 7 years, such products are declared "obsolete", indicating that mainstream customer support has come to an end.

On occasion, Apple may extend exchange and repair programs in response to a known manufacturing defect in a production run of a specific product.

Software examples

 * HFS Plus, a long-used drive format that had been superseded by APFS since 2017 with MacOS 10.13.
 * QuickTime, a classic media technology that had been superseded by QuickTime X since 2009.
 * 32-bit software, which was last supported "without compromise" in macOS High Sierra (10.13), and was superseded by macOS Catalina (10.15) in 2019, which only supported 64-bit software.