Is my system up to date

Sonoma is the highest version of macOS that will run on your machine.

It is still one of the "most recent three" that vendors like Adobe and Microsoft support, and will be for about another year, until the successor to Tahoe comes out. Even after that, it will probably be supported by third-party browsers and by applications such as LibreOffice. (I kept an old iMac running for years after Apple stopped supporting it with new versions of macOS. What finally sidelined it was hardware failure.)

I would encourage you to download the latest versions of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, and IMovie, if you have not already. Those applications already require Sonoma or better, which suggests that if Apple updates them, the requirement might change to Sequoia or better. At that point there would be a possibility that you could not get Sonoma-compatible versions from the App Store at all.

Daveq16 wrote:

I have a Macbook Air 13" from 2019 and I am running Sonoma 14.7.8. It seems to be doing all I want it to do. Any suggestions?

The current version of Sonoma is macOS Sonoma 14.8.1

About the security content of macOS Sonoma 14.8.1

Keep your Mac up to date

Always make a Time Machine Backup  before doing any upDates

Daveq16 wrote:

I have a Macbook Air 13" from 2019 and I am running Sonoma 14.7.8. It seems to be doing all I want it to do. Any suggestions?

Enjoy it. Don't be fooled by internet claims that you're at risk if you don't have the latest version of everything. You're fine.

That being said, most security updates don't cause any change in behaviour.

For older OS versions, and version updates will cause few changes in behaviour. The most likely change that you would notice would be in Safari. Sometimes Apple back-ports Safari changes. Unfortunately, these changes can be disruptive.

And of course, major OS upgrades like Tahoe are disruptive. As a developer, I have to keep one machine running the latest version so I can test my software. But I always keep my primary machine running the oldest version of macOS that Apple will accept for App Store submissions.

etresoft wrote:

For older OS versions, and version updates will cause few changes in behaviour. The most likely change that you would notice would be in Safari. Sometimes Apple back-ports Safari changes. Unfortunately, these changes can be disruptive.

Safari Release Notes | Apple Developer Documentation

"Safari 26.0 is available for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, visionOS 26, macOS 26, macOS Sequoia, and macOS Sonoma."

It looks like Sonoma will be getting the latest versions of Safari until it falls off the list of the "most recent three", next year.