Forced upgrade to Sonoma: can it be stopped?

Also happened to me last week - mac pro - from monterey - and to top it all off its stuck in a boot loop. Absolute ball ache. i did not want to upgrade to sonoma and never gave permission. What a load of absolute rubbish. my time machine drive (lacie rugged 5tb) had literally just died 2 weeks before too so cant restore easily from that. have other clones and backups but still im grumpy as a result grrrrrr

Nice to know one is not alone in this. I sent my sob story to Apple in complaint. What was weird for me was that I was failing to get the Ventura installer to work off a USB, and as others have mentioned the recovery wasn't allowing me to reinstall from a TM backup, which I had. After two hours I gave up and contacted support. The person on that chat asked me why I wanted to downgrade so I explained. Then she asked me to do some checks which I did and then went silent for a while, then asked me to shut down and boot into recovery and select the USB which I had already tried, and it hadn't shown up as a volume for me to select. I said I had already tried that and there was no reply and then the chat got terminated. What the **** I thought I've nothing to lose now by shutting down. So I tried it and this time the installer volume appeared so eventually I was able to get back to Ventura.

I don’t like how Sonoma also forces format your hhd or ssd to the new format instead of keeping hfs+ journaled. Doesn’t matter if you wipe format back to hfs soon as it updates to Sonoma it’s back on apfs slowing the entire machine down cpu is idol at 3% yet taking forever to load

Confirming the forced upgrade from Monterey to Sonoma on two Macs here today.

Now erasing my boot drive and reinstalling Monterey.

%#@&^%=)(!

I’m not crazy! Well, I may be crazy, but I’m not the only one who got a forced upgrade to Sonoma today.

frankybigguns wrote:

Thanks a lot Apple!

This is why we have Time Machine, and spare computers. Even so, I had to create a bootable USB to recover. The morning after, I'm still cleaning up the mess.

Very strange that it didn't work! Indicates to me the first install was borked a bit.

Thanks for the report, took awhile here but Dock eventually came back without a restart‽

Ah, I only use Clones, TM has only let me down when I needed it.

That /tmp trick is really neat, 2nd time I've read ahout it working when nothing else would! :)

Wow‽

Wowser! :(

Based on my experience, there are really only two upgrade options - now or later.

BDAqua wrote:

I think I'd uncheck download new updates when available.

People (including me) did that and yet it happened anyway.

Hence the anger.

Thanks for the report.