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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
#!/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
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.
Just to make sure everyone knows—you can ALWAYS call Apple Support, regardless of how recently you purchased a device or your AppleCare status. It’s free phone support for all users and has been for many years now.
I’d be a little surprised if it was mentioned and not in the slightest bit worried if Apple said nothing about it. Adoption rate of Sonoma has no effect on Apple’s financials, so the only reason Apple would trot out a stat like that would be to distract from less-positive numbers.
Apple is aware and concerned themselves. Last night, I spent ~45" on the phone (a call back at 9 PM) with an Apple Senior Advisor. I told him that my problem was “resolved” but I had no idea how. He said what Engineering really needs is a Feedback report posted while the machine is actually being threatened with the unwanted update, so that Feedback can grab all the logs, and they can get a detailed look at the state of the machine. I had posted a Feedback, but it was after the situation was resolved so my logs were likely not as helpful.
The Senior Advisor was extremely courteous and sympathetic. He emphasized that Apple can’t fix things they don’t know are broken, and encouraged folks to report problems BOTH to Support and through the Feedback Assistant app.
I had a similar experience yesterday. I’d stuck with Ventura because of worry that some of my apps wouldn’t run under Sonoma. I’ve been having some nagging little problems with my 2019 iMac, so I restarted it yesterday. I figured it would take awhile, so left it to do its thing. I checked on it a couple of times, thinking it was taking longer than usual. When it had finally finished, my OS had been updated to Sonoma. I’ve been a Mac user almost since day one, and this is the first time Apple has done something like this without my approval.
Well, I’m glad my iMac is maxed out at MacOS 10.13.6 and my MacBook Pro at 12.7.2. My MacBook Air was maxed out at 10.13.6 but the SSD died so I have to recycle it. I’m going to pull the SSD chips off the motherboard first and smash them to be safe.
That’s scary. I’ve been holding off upgrading my 2021 MBP M1 because I don’t want to lose my MsgFiler plugin in Apple Mail. I hope that doesn’t happen to me.