I may not have remembered completely correctly, since it was only on-screen for a few seconds and I wasn’t paying much attention at the time.
There was definitely a “Details” item. I don’t think there was a “Restart”, and I’m still remembering “Install” in that position.
Either way, I ignored both of them and then clicked the “X” to dismiss it. Then the download/install seems to have begun.
Likely, since I have my Mac configured to not auto-download anything. Which would explain why I later got the notification telling me to restart in order to complete the installation.
I think before we blame the evil Apple overlords…we ought to wait and see what analysis of the issue produces…then we can use the actual facts of this situation to decide blame.
I’m not blaming “evil overlords,” I’m blaming irresponsible incompetency.
My wife’s laptop just did it this evening. I do not know how I actually aborted it on my system (blind luck it seems). I have not heard a consistent way to do so. I’ll let you know in a few more hours (that I had better things to do in).
When my system did it, I actually found where the installer was lurking. It’s somewhere else on hers.
OK, I refuse to accept any liability for this, but…
Having successfully averted this on two machines, and compared notes with a good friend, I have some observations.
I believe that any response to the first notification that says Sonoma is available and you should update (regardless of what your Software Update settings are) is ignored and the Sonoma installer is downloaded…
At this point, you will find the installer in
It then puts up a notification to reboot (that you have to mouse-over to find cancel). However, that notification appears to respect the cancel.
Then I restarted directly into Recovery, disabled SIP, rebooted to find “/System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_MacSoftwareUpdate/” is now empty.
At that point at least some of the installer has moved to /System/Volumes/Updates. It was not there immediately before. I deleted that before I reenabled SIP.
I did these steps on my wife’s and my machines. So far so good.
My friend only canceled the “Restart…” notification. A couple days later his MacBook tried it again.
This is not enough data to conclude anything. Just some ideas to pursue.
I have a little detail to add. My wife and I’s macs never tried to update, although I got the message on one of them. On my wife’s we did not get the message, but the installer was downloaded, anyway. Seems the
I am beyond tired of the arbitrary yearly upgrade cycle. I’d rather wait a bit and get a better product, assuming Apple can even come up with a Mac OS anymore that offers me anything I want. As it is, I won’t touch an OS “upgrade” until its final version, if then.
Thanks, this is great. I cannot confirm this right now but I think you will find that if you use the terminal in Recovery you will find /System/Volumes/Update and /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_MacSoftwareUpdate/ in /Volumes/YourHDname\ -\ Data/ You will then be able to delete the downloaded OS software directly without disabling SIP and several more reboots.
These days, there is no “final version” until security upgrades stop, at which point the OS is obsoleted and unsupported. The closest there is to a viable “final version” is the last version released before its successor is released. Is that what you mean by “final version”?
Me, I generally tend to avoid upgrading the OS until forced to by some other piece of software that I need to use. I kept my 2019 16" MBP on Catalina until MS 365 started requiring Big Sur for continued updates. Since the updates are the primary point of the subscription, continuing the sub without updates would have been wasted money.
I probably won’t upgrade to Monterey or Ventura until similarly required by software, and Sonoma (or whatever successor is current at the time) will probably wait until it’s time to replace this MBP with something Silicon.
I’m curious if the folks getting the forced upgrade have checked the “check for updates” box? So, is it possible that simply checking can trigger the update–even though autoupdate is off?
My M3 iMac was already on Sonoma 14.1.1 when this began to occur so I cannot test this.
This is what I’ve been defining that as. Once the next major version is released, the prior version stops getting new features and should only be getting bug fixes and security updates.
I think a few people here have reported that they did not have that box checked.
But notification (without auto-installation) is the behavior I want when that box is checked.
I’m the same, I have Check for updates checked, but Download new updates when available and Install macOS updates unchecked (forced by Download… being unchecked). I want to be informed of new updates, but not have the update downloaded or installed until I tell it to. That’s how it’s worked for… ever? Until now evidently.
I skipped a couple of version of the OS a while back, but found that could cause troubles because each new OS appears to be written with the assumption that users will have be running the immediately previous one – so it will not add features that it thought should have been installed by the previous update. Now I usually update the OS just before the next update comes out, and it seems to save trouble.
It’s been a long time since I looked forward to a new version of the Mac OS.
I deliberately chose M1 over M2 when I decided to give silicon Macs a try because the M1s allow me to run Monterey. Monterey is the minimum for one of the photo processing apps I’m trying out (Luminar Neo).
Apple seems to have developed more problems with their software quality assurance. One aspect of buying an Apple product is that it should work without problems. They are definitely playing around with features too late in the development for operating systems. This is going to produce problems especially with interactions between the components. I’ve forgotten what it was, but they were actually looking at how something would operate with only 1-2 months to release date. Makes a new definition of beta. One risk they take is eventually they will brick say 1 in a thousand iPhones, which is about a million very unhappy customers.
A few days ago I chose the Details option from that popup. It launched a browser and opened a Sonoma page. Most importantly, it dismissed the notification, and I haven’t had a Sonoma update nag since. So maybe this is an easy way to prevent the update. (I’m currently running MacOS 12 Monterey.)
I wasn’t giving them a pass…and on further review as they say perhaps evil Apple overlords didn’t convey the humorous tone I intended…shoulda added that smiley😀. It could be incompetence…and it won’t surprise me if it is although I intended consequences and less than adequate testing could also be the issue and even then it could be incompetence or just the inability to test every possible scenario. My point was that at this point we don’t really know the extent or cause or scope of the problem, not to mention the whole every system is configured and operated differently…we’ve seen anecdotal evidence only. There’s been enough of that to warrant investigating…and I’m sure that Apple and likely others are working on that. Calling it irresponsible incompetency might be overstating it…but then again it might not be.
Me too…just call it macOS like it’s Unix or Solaris and skip the names. Version numbers hidden in the About box are probably fine…but just issue service packs or whatever they want to call them when they’re done and tested. The annual cycle is driven solely by the marketing geeks IMO.