GitHub to Retire macOS 13 Runner Image by December 2025 - What Developers Need to Know

GitHub pulls the plug on macOS 13 support—migration deadlines loom for developers worldwide.

Timeline Tightens

The platform confirms full retirement by December 2025, giving teams roughly three months to adapt their CI/CD pipelines. No extensions planned—GitHub's moving fast toward newer infrastructure.

Impact on Development Workflows

Builds relying on macOS 13 runners face imminent disruption. Teams must transition to supported images or risk deployment failures. The change affects thousands of repositories—especially those clinging to legacy dependencies.

Strategic Shift or Cost Cutting?

While GitHub frames this as progress, skeptics note the timing aligns with their parent company's latest earnings pressure. Because nothing says 'efficiency' like forcing entire dev teams into unplanned migration work—almost makes you miss the days when tech companies actually invested in backward compatibility.

GitHub has announced its decision to retire the macOS 13 runner image by December 4, 2025, as part of its ongoing updates to the GitHub Actions platform. According to The GitHub Blog, this MOVE is aimed at encouraging users to transition to newer macOS versions and architectures.

Scheduled Brownout Periods

To ensure users are aware of the upcoming change, GitHub will temporarily fail jobs that utilize the macOS 13 runner during scheduled brownout periods. These brownouts are slated for the following dates and times:

• November 4, 14:00 UTC to November 5, 00:00 UTC
• November 11, 14:00 UTC to November 12, 00:00 UTC
• November 18, 14:00 UTC to November 19, 00:00 UTC
• November 25, 14:00 UTC to November 26, 00:00 UTC

Migration Recommendations

As part of the deprecation process, GitHub has outlined several migration paths for users. Workflows that are architecture agnostic are encouraged to transition to arm64 labels such as macos-15, macos-latest, or macos-14. For those requiring x86_64 (Intel) architecture, new labels like macos-15-intel have been introduced to support standard runner users.

Future of macOS x86_64 (Intel) Architecture

The announcement also highlighted the broader deprecation of x86_64 (Intel) architecture by Apple. GitHub plans to cease support for this architecture on macOS after the retirement of the macOS 15 runner image in Fall 2027. Users are advised to begin migrating to arm64-based (Apple Silicon) runners to ensure compatibility with future updates.

For detailed information on label changes and migration strategies, users can visit the runner images repository on GitHub's platform. This transition reflects the ongoing shift towards more modern architectures and the need for developers to adapt to evolving technological standards.

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