Help! Is my iOS on it's last leg?!

@wcervera the key phrase here is "recommeneded" not required. This is most likely the last version to support Big Sur. Future versions may require Monterey or newer. Historically PS has supported current +1 on the OS side.

The alert should not prevent you from using Photoshop 2024. After you click OK, Photoshop should run normally (subject to the warnings in the alert message).

The key word in the alert message is “recommended.” It does not say you must upgrade to macOS 13.4, it only says that macOS 13.4 is recommended for “maximum performance and correct operation.”

It’s an oddly worded message because it makes it sound like “incorrect” things might happen, but I have not had problems running Photoshop 2024 on macOS 12. I believe what the alert is trying to say is that the engineers have taken advantage of new Apple technologies that only exist in macOS 13.4 or later, so earlier versions of macOS might not run certain features quite as well.

If you look at the published Photoshop system requirements, it says the supported Mac operating systems for the current version of Photoshop are “macOS Big Sur (version 11.0) or later.” So what you have is supported and will work, just not recommended.

Now, the thing you want to watch out for is this:

Every year, both Apple and Adobe release another major upgrade. Both Apple and Adobe offer updates supporting the last three versions of macOS. macOS 11 Big Sur is about to fall off that supported list now that Apple has released macOS 14 Sonoma. So if you want to continue receiving updates from Apple and Adobe, it would be good to upgrade beyond macOS 11 before next fall.

In addition, if Adobe increases the Photoshop system requirements every year as they often do, when the next big Photoshop update comes probably next autumn, it is likely that macOS 11 Big Sur will not be supported by that upgrade so Photoshop 2024 might be the last to run on macOS 11. That is another reason to consider moving past macOS 11.

If you can’t or don’t want to upgrade beyond macOS 11, you can continue to use the versions you have indefinitely, as long as you don’t uninstall it and are OK not getting more updates (including security updates) from Apple or Adobe after next fall.

I am not a Mac user and have limited experience with Mac hardware, but I do know that some Mac users have to use earlier versions of Photoshop because current Photoshop versions need more recent OS versions, and there comes a point when OS updates are incompatible with old hardware.

[EDIT]  Before I edited this post, its typos were so bad I couldn't understand what I thought I'd typed, so I had to pretty much start from scratch.   It's bugger getting old. 😞