What Apple’s support calendar means for a phone you already own

Vintage and obsolete are Apple’s words, with dated definitions. They are not a promise that a given model dies on a particular morning.

TechWorth editorial · Last reviewed 6 September 2026

Apple’s vintage and obsolete page says a product becomes vintage more than five years after Apple stopped distributing it for sale, and obsolete more than seven years after that stop. Those are policy windows, not a security-update timetable.

TechWorth turns that published rule into a remaining-months range on each product, with the page cited. An iPhone 12 and an iPhone 13 therefore do not share a made-up end date. If we have also observed the model in Apple’s own security-release table, the support sub-page can be indexed; until then it stays reachable with noindex.

The generic should I upgrade page uses documented defaults. Your own battery and faults belong in the questionnaire.