12-year-old MacBook Pro unable to update software, causing WhatsApp and Chrome to stop working

Over time it becomes more costly, among other issues, for companies to maintain compatibility of their software with obsolete operating systems. If you have issues, feel free to contact meta and Google with your concern. There should be no expectation that a 12-year-old computer would run more modern software due to technology advances, hardware requirements, and security vulnerabilities.

Google may have abandoned support for your MacBook Pro – Google Chrome now requires Big Sur or higher, and it sounds like you have a Mac for which Catalina is the end of the line.

The current versions of Firefox and LibreOffice (from the Web site, not the App Store) will run on Catalina. As will the commercial Affinity V2 applications (Photo, Designer, Publisher). So there are some options if you want to get a bit more life out of that old machine.

apple can't really force them to support older macOS versions

just take a big company like Microsoft they only support the latest 3 macOS versions for their office suit (and likely their other software products)

Rudegar wrote:

just take a big company like Microsoft they only support the latest 3 macOS versions for their office suit (and likely their other software products)

Microsoft also added a TPM ("Trusted Program Module") requirement for Windows 11. This requirement means that many PC owners with systems that can run Windows 10 are locked out of Windows 11.

You do not say which exact MacBook Pro it is, but it may be correct to assume that the latest possible macOS version is 10.15 Catalina or 11 Big Sur (depending on the model/year).

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/index-macbookpro.html

One problem is that compatible web browsers are difficult to find for older systems. If so, you could perhaps check whether, for example, Firefox (either the normal or the extended support release) would improve matters.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/desktop-release/osx/

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/desktop-esr/osx/

EDIT: Just noticed that Servant of Cats had replied while I was composing my message.