That was infinitely preferable. It also made it easy to save the installer.
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If you get that notification, what’s the method to avoid the upgrade?
Edit: I don’t mean what to do one it has decided to auto upgrade. I meant, how to react to the notification without getting into trouble, since people are saying that simply dismissing it won’t work.
(I found the answer: ask for more Info.)
Wish I could confidently say the “Desperate Measures:” I described above would definitely avoid it, but I can’t.
I reported all this in Feedback #FB13535133. It is currently tagged “Recent Similar Reports: None”
One squeaky wheel is just a voice in the wilderness… ;~}
I am seeing reports elsewhere that the notification has started appearing, so I guess this is some sort of staggered wave or something. Anyway, it’s clearly the promo notification that’s causing this, which is rather unique. For myself, my settings are to check for and download updates, update MAS apps, and install security updates, but not to install macOS updates.
The notifications are coming from a background update called “macOSInstallerNotification_RC” that was pushed to all Ventura users at a random time on Jan 10, but I’m skeptical of the reports that it forces a Sonoma update without the users permission. If the computer is shutdown at that random time, it will simply be delayed another 24 hours. I’m not sure at what point the notification is then displayed after installation. It’s unlikely that any FB will be acted upon since it’s behaving as it was designed to.
This isn’t the first time Apple has done this.
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First time I’d heard of this mechanism and it seems that, indeed, this isn’t the first time Apple have used a security updates mechanism to push upgrade promos (which is, FMM, deeply questionable). Howard Oakley, as usual, has the scoop.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that a newly-introduced bug isn’t causing unintended upgrades, although I’ll grant that it could just as easily be accidental.
Whatever it was, I and others got it under Monterey. I read Mr. Oakley’s article, but I have no /Library/Bundles, ~/Library/Bundles directories, nor OSXNotification.bundle, macOSInstallerNotification_RC anywhere. The only *.db file in ~/Library/Application Support/Notification Center dated to 10/16/2014 (and the only OS reference was “Mavericks”). Either the system deleted it or Monterey used a different mechanism.
The only thing Apple gets for their trouble is I have now turned off the XProtect, etc. updates too. I will rely on Mr. Oakley’s “SilentKnight” instead.
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Howard’s article is talking about the upgrade-advertisement being installed via the critical security response mechanism. Which is scummy, but not necessarily dangerous.
In this case, however, dismissing the notification triggered installation. That hasn’t happened before. I remember dismissing the “would you like to upgrade to High Sierra?” announcements on my Sierra-based laptop for years, and it never tried to install anything afterward.
Similarly, when my Mac mini was running Catalina and Big Sur, it frequently auto-downloaded installer images for Monterey and Ventura, and occasionally nagged me to install them, but it never auto-installed anything.
This situation is new (at least to my experience).
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Same here. I can recall multiple times I’ve received a notification to upgrade to the latest macOS within a week or two after it’s been released. I simply dismiss them and move on. This time it’s much later than usual (almost a month after Sonoma was released), and when I dismissed the notification, it started the upgrade process. So this is also new in my experience and most unwelcome.
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Got me too. Since installing Ventura and keeping it up to the most recent version, have routinely dismissed many suggestions to upgrade to Sonoma. This morning I reviewed the Update Software Settings panel, and confirmed that no “additional software is available…” notice was advertising a security update for Ventura, and I closed the Settings. I restarted my Mac Pro just on general principle, since it had been running a week or so. Much to my surprise, after a longer than expected process with several flashings on and off of the monitor, on restart I was running Sonoma.
Some good news. The major installer bug which inserted an alias in the file path to my relocated User Spaces seems to be fixed. But the installer is still buggy in addition to running unwanted. I have an Apple RAID of SSDs created by Disk Utility. This was not present, nor even visible in Finder or Disk Utility immediately after the Sonoma install. Fortunately, after a second restart this reappeared. Other than that things seem OK.
I have a thought that I really do not like, but will offer here for what it’s worth. The ongoing deterioration of the quality of macOS, leading to many, including myself and others who have posted on TidBITS, advising not to install new system software until the .3 bug fix version or later. Presumably this broad discussion led to last fall Apple announcing “a week of fixing bugs,” which was greeted with relief, as well as much skepticism.
Scheduled for Thursday, February 1 Apple has a conference call to discuss first fiscal quarter results and business updates, then the 2024 Annual Meeting of Shareholders on February 28. Could the bug leading to many unwanted installations of Sonoma be generating data which could be falsely interpreted as a surge of acceptance of the less buggy product? Some say we should not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. That may be true, and unfortunately Apple has shown itself to have the necessary incompetence in quality control, but this sure looks sleazy. It will be interesting to see if the acceptance rate of Sonoma is mentioned in the upcoming discussions of corporate operations.
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It’s probable that I don’t recall the exact details from past encounters like this, but I’ve never known these sorts of notifications to be anything other than “dark patterns” requiring care not to hit the wrong option, but I’m usually pretty careful and cautious so that might just have been my paranoia. In my case I simply closed the notification thinking it was just informational, and came back later to my machine (iMac 2020) to find that the upgrade was already happening, which I connected with the notification and that I found to be faintly surprising, but somehow not unexpected; your thread on this is the first time I’d really given it serious thought. Which, I suppose, is exactly the sort of mentality Apple wants to inculcate in its suckers. :d
My server Mac (Ventura) is completely unaffected, presumably because it’s in DND mode perpetually. I guess it’s the closing of the notification, as such, that sets this off. If the mechanism howard describes is not that responsible, I’d be interested to know what is.
Here is a previous discussion about upgrade nagging:
Unlikely to be helpful for Sonoma upgrades (the “ignore”:command no longer works) but there may be some other ideas to try out.
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I got the notification, used the hidden* action button to get “Info”, it didn’t upgrade.
(*) hidden until you mouse over it
3 Likes
Ventura 13.6.3
MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019
I got the notification, clicked the X, and the notification went away.
Later, I accidentally clicked System Settings > Software Update Available > Upgrade Now. The download began (black screen with progress bar), and I immediately pressed the power button to shut down my computer. When I restarted, the update had not taken place.
For what it’s worth, when I click the Info icon to the right of System Settings > Automatic updates > Security updates only, these boxes are checked:
Check for updates
Download new updates when available
Install Security Responses and system files
I had 2 machines force upgrade me. A MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro 2019. In both cases, I don’t recall what I did to trigger it.
I didn’t get any notification on either Mac, but I did get a handful of restarts and progress bars before Sonoma came up.
To roll back my MacBook, I had to format the drive and install Ventura using Internet recovery. Since it was a clone of my desktop I connected it with a Thunderbolt cable and used Migration assistant since that was much faster that using the backup on my NAS.
There is one method that will get you time to research. Enter Recovery.
I have been thinking about another solution. I can not recommend this, because I do not know for sure what will happen, but if this happens to me I will try to check if the system installer show up as a disk if I follow this Startup Disk And then if it does, I will choose the disk I have my old system on. If it does not work, I will do a hard shutdown at once. Never if it has already done one of the reboots the installer always does.
I found this script that you can use to check OS downloads via Jamf. https://community.jamf.com/t5/jamf-pro/monitor-software-update-download-status/td-p/263400
#!/bin/sh
path_updates=$(ls "/System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_MacSoftwareUpdate" | grep asset)
if [ "${path_updates}" ]; then
path_updates=("/System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_MacSoftwareUpdate"/$path_updates)
echo "Update Path is $path_updates"
download_version=$(/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Print :MobileAssetProperties:OSVersion" "${path_updates}/Info.plist")
echo "Version Downloaded is $download_version"
else
echo "No updates downloaded"
fi
I checked and got the following output:
Update Path is /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_MacSoftwareUpdate/f1a0644b170af1921730ab729dd1cccf6dad96b8.asset
Version Downloaded is 14.2.1
2 Likes
One more data point. My wife works from home on a company-supplied MacBook Pro (Intel). Last week she was surprised on startup to find she was being updated from Ventura to Sonoma. Her MBP runs mostly corporate software via a VPN. Updates and other IT support is generally handled by her company’s IT department. She assumed the Sonoma surprise was requested by corporate IT support.
If so, perhaps there are reasons not yet widely known to do so. Perhaps a major security breach has been patched in Sonoma but is not easily fixed in older Systems. This could explain the urgent forced updates, which many of us have agreed to for smaller security patches. It could also explain the lack of discussion of the forced updates, since such discussion would reveal the vulnerability of older Systems.
If not, and the update was as much a surprise to IT support as to the rest of us, this seems to confirm a major bug. My guess is unexpected major modifications of managed corporate software are not welcome by corporate IT.
Unfortunately for this discussion, my wife chooses to remain a frictionless cog in the corporate machinery, invisible outside her assigned duties. So long as her IT works, she will not trouble support by asking about issues such as this, so we do not have the information to distinguish between the two possibilities outlined above.
Perhaps other readers who are currently active in corporate IT management could comment. Even something like “NDAs do not allow any discussion, but all will be revealed in good time” would reassure our faith in Apple. The alternative, “Surprised us too that software on our Mac clients was randomly changed” would confirm for us that pushing unwanted major updates is yet another serious bug in macOS, apparently newly introduced after the announced big push to fix bugs.