# Moving packaging and installers to macOS 10.13 as a minimum

**URL:** <https://discuss.python.org/t/moving-packaging-and-installers-to-macos-10-13-as-a-minimum/31907>\
**Category:** Packaging\
**Created:** [August 19, 2023, 1:09am UTC](https://discuss.python.org/t/moving-packaging-and-installers-to-macos-10-13-as-a-minimum/31907 "2023-08-19T01:09:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 5

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**Author:** ![hugovk](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discuss.python.org/hugovk/32/14505_2.png) [@hugovk](https://discuss.python.org/u/hugovk)\
**Post date:** [August 19, 2023, 9:52pm UTC](https://discuss.python.org/t/moving-packaging-and-installers-to-macos-10-13-as-a-minimum/31907/5 "2023-08-19T21:52:33Z")

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> [@ronaldoussoren](#):
>
> The annoying part is that we cannot refer to Apple documentation for this, AFAIK they don’t have a documented support policy for macOS although we can infer that their support policy is general security updates for the last major release.

Third-party sites such as [Apple macOS | endoflife.date](https://endoflife.date/macos) say the last three main releases are usually supported:

> Major versions of macOS are released once a year now, and usually maintained for three years. Apple usually provides security updates for the latest 3 releases, but this isn’t consistently applied and some security fixes aren’t available for the non-latest releases.

(The three latest being macOS 11, 12 and 13.)

[macOS version history - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases) has something similar.

* * *

For [Pillow](https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow), we nominally only support upstream supported OS releases, but for macOS we set `MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.10` for Intel because we had quite a few people asking for older versions at some point, and it’s not too much extra effort (and `MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=11.0` for Apple Silicon, the earliest).

Looking at pip installs for the newest Pillow 10.0.0 for the last 28 days (via `pypinfo --days 28 --percent --limit 1000 --json "pillow==10.0.0" system distro-version` using [pypinfo](https://github.com/ofek/pypinfo), and summarising with [macos-versions.py](https://github.com/hugovk/pypi-tools/blob/main/macos-versions.py)):

| system\_name | distro\_version | download\_count | percent | summed\_percent |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Darwin | 10.7 | 2 | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| Darwin | 10.9 | 16 | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| Darwin | 10.10 | 54 | 0.01% | 100.00% |
| Darwin | 10.11 | 134 | 0.01% | 99.99% |
| Darwin | 10.12 | 292 | 0.03% | 99.98% |
| Darwin | 10.13 | 1,664 | 0.17% | 99.95% |
| Darwin | 10.14 | 2,066 | 0.22% | 99.78% |
| Darwin | 10.15 | 11,597 | 1.21% | 99.56% |
| Darwin | 11 | 195,519 | 20.38% | 98.35% |
| Darwin | 12 | 426,878 | 44.49% | 77.97% |
| Darwin | 13 | 312,566 | 32.57% | 33.48% |
| Darwin | 14 | 8,715 | 0.91% | 0.91% |
| Darwin | 15 | 7 | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| Darwin | 16 | 19 | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| Darwin | None | 31 | 0.00% | 0.00% |

This shows 98.35% is 11+, and 99.95% is 10.13+.

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