Adam
I read your last paragraph as “you can now safely update to X.6.1” while in your original message you advised us to wait a week or two. According to you can/should I update?
Norbert
And on the day it was released, I upgraded to 17.6.1 with no problems detected so far.
Curious – is anyone else experiencing this?.
I updated to 14.6.1 both at work and at home shortly after it came out. Both machines are shut down overnight. Now whenever I restart, the grey notification comes up saying there is a system software update available; do I want to install now or later. However, when I go into System Settings > General > Software Update it tells me I’m up to date with macOS Sonoma 14.6.1 (23G93).
Do you have a device running the iOS betas attached (wired or wireless) to your Mac? That might be causing this. In the past it seems the software update wasn’t available, but as of the update it’s been made available so you’re prompted to install it.
No, I don’t download/install iOS or macOS betas.
Also, no iOS devices are/were connected to the Mac Studios,
You could try Howard Oakley’s SilentKnight This is how it looks when you are still on 14.5.
Maybe one thing on this list is not up to date? Or if all is OK, you can ignore the notification?
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Thanks – I installed and ran Silent Knight at home – confirms there are there are no updates available. The notification continues to appear.
Our work systems are pretty much locked down and unfortunately not worth the hassle of trying to get IT approval to install Silent Knight there.
Just a nuisance having to go into software update every day to double check that no updates have appeared.
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I experience the exact same thing with 14.6.1. And I don’t even sleep or shut down the systems over night. When I arrive in the morning, they’re showing that updates are available. Click on the notification and it takes you to the update page in Settings where it shows that no updates are available.
Apparently nobody is checking the OS or its “developer betas” for bugs anymore. It’s all just one big never-ending public beta. 
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I’m not quite sure of all the references, but here are my current recommendations:
My revised advice about updating to this set of updates is as follows:
- If you’re still running macOS 14.5, iOS 17.5, and iPadOS 17.5 with no problems, stick with them for a bit longer. None of the identified security vulnerabilities in those releases are actively being exploited in the wild, so there’s no big win in updating right away. Revisit the question in a few weeks.
- If you updated to macOS 14.6, iOS 17.6, and iPadOS 17.6 but aren’t having any problems and don’t intend to turn Advanced Data Protection on or off, stick with them for another week or two to make sure Apple didn’t introduce any more bugs in the latest updates.
- If you updated to macOS 14.6, iOS 17.6, and iPadOS 17.6 and are having issues of any sort or want to turn Advanced Data Protection on or off, update right away to take advantage of Apple’s fixes.
This problem happened on the 2 Macs I manage: one is an M1 mini and the other an M2 MacBook Air.
On both updates, which I manually installed from Settings, I’ve seen a strange notification bug.
After the updates completed and I logged in to the restarted system, I got a notification that updates were available. If I moused over the lower right corner of the notification and clicked on Details, it opened the Settings app to the Update screen and nicely showed that I was already up-to-date.
The notification usually appeared the day after the update, and would reappear every other day until I used the Details button to dismiss the notification.
Prior to 14.6, I’ve never seen this ill-informed notification.
I also saw this one after the 14.6 update (2018 Intel Mac mini). It presented a notification saying that an update is available, but after going to Software Updates, there was nothing available.
Last week, I ignored (clicked the “X” dismiss button) the notification about 14.6.1. When it appeared again a few days later, I ignored it again. Then when I decided to install the update (yesterday), I saw 14.6.1 listed twice on the list of available updates.
I started the update and left the room (didn’t come back for several hours), so I don’t know if it tried to install the update twice. It is (successfully, it appears) running 14.6.1, and the installation only appears once in System Information:
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Same problem occurs on my M1 Mini after update to 14.6 and 14.6.1. Frequency of the notification decreases after 1-2 days even after hitting delete button on the notification.
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Each of the 3 macOS updates I’ve done and at least a couple IIRC of the iOS/iPadOS ones did the same thing but the alert on final reboot disappeared once I went to Update in preferences and let it scan and tell me I was up to date.
… And I just got a spurious notification today, after having installed 14.6.1.
Hopefully that will do it. I just clicked through the alert on my system.
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I have an M1 MacBook Air which refuses to update to 14.6.1 and seems “stuck” at 14.5. Judging from what I’ve read in these comments, maybe it’s actually a good thing it won’t update, as I’m not experiencing any of the problems 14.6.1 is causing! 
For those who remember the classic MacOS days, right before the transition was made to OS X, users were complaining that the OS was becoming “buggier and buggier” - and that “we are being patched to death”. That same thing is happening now. Seems like we will need something to replace our beloved Unix-based OS very soon…!
I think not. As I understand it, macOS is derived from BSD UNIX, which has been under constant development/patching since the 1970s or earlier. A virtue of UNIX is keeping things as local as possible, the opposite of “spagetti programming”. When bugs are found the defective code can be corrected with minimal affects on other parts of the code. UNIX is made to facilitate patching. An example (with some controversy) is the Apache web server.
You said “UNIX is made to facilitate patching.” So the constant patching of our operating system is OK with you? It stands to reason that the more patches are made, the more unstable something becomes. Patches don’t make something stronger, they make it weaker.
To fix bugs and security issues - yes, I’d rather have the OS patched than used it unpatched.
I’m not sure that’s true.
I’ve also seen a response that says that bugs are worse now than they used to be, but how do you quantify that? If bugs (particularly security issues) were undiscovered and unpatched, it was still a bug.
The issue is that our computers are now more connected than ever so patching security holes in particular is vitally important, especially for people with lots of valuable information stored on their computers, online, etc. I prefer Apple issuing updates when it’s important to do so rather than waiting for the second Tuesday of every month, as Microsoft does.
But the thing is that if you prefer updating once a month or something like that, just update when it’s convenient for you, unless, of course, the bug is something affecting your use of the Mac. Just know that there is a potential issue that may make your system vulnerable, but that’s no different than every Windows user who needs to wait until Patch Tuesday.
The inability to toggle Advanced Data Protection is not a concern for me - I have it toggled on, I don’t need to toggle it off right now, but if I do need to, I know that I can do so after an update (or just do it on my iPad or iPhone instead.)
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That depends on the nature of the patches. Nowadays all my Debian server systems (mostly VMs) are configured to do automatic upgrades, because the patches from the Debian Security Team are intentionally very small and only fix security issues, which are worth having, in a timely manner. Even such gradualism is not proof against adversity, though: Debian recently had a nasty ext4 corruption issue as a result of importing the “Stable” kernel from upstream, over which they have limited control. But, overwhelmingly, it is an enormous benefit to carefully introduce changes that are known to be good for security and stability.
In my opinion Apple’s QA is on the floor, however, undeniably macOS is a large and complex operating system with a lot of moving parts, and it’s intended to be user-friendly to boot. There’s just no getting away from the fact that a large surface area like that is going to make more of the bugs shallower and more noticeable to larger numbers of people.