Forced upgrade to Sonoma: can it be stopped?

I was forced to upgrade on 1/16/2024. I find it interesting and my Time Machine backup stopped working. The USB stopped working. An unplug and replug usually fixes this. However, this time a restart was necessary. After the restart, which took suspiciously long, the login screen came up Sonoma.

Not cool Apple. In 20 years, I've never experienced this.

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

I am a Developer and have been doing this since 1986. Today my 16" MBP went from Monterey to Sonoma without my permission. I was intentionally keeping it on Monterey for testing purposes. It will take a full day to take it back to where it was. Apple was never like this when Steve was around.

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

Now erasing my boot drive and reinstalling Monterey.

%#@&^%=)(!

Hi all, another forced update user here today. I made a thread for my issue here before finding this: Sonoma installed itself - Apple Community

I've also submitted a bug report to Apple. Hopefully we get an answer as to why this has happened. I use Pro Tools and other legacy software not qualified for Sonoma and now most of it isn't working.

My 2018 MacBook pro just updated itself to Sonoma from Ventura. I was holding off because one of the household computers is too old for Sonoma... WTF apple? I only had the 'security updates' set for automatic..

BDAqua wrote:

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

Doesn't matter. Didn't work anyway.

I have found the problem and a workaround. It seems that when you restore from Time Machine, none of your apps will be recognized until you launch them. Of course, Apple apps are exempted. I just need to go through and manually run all my apps.

Same today, 13 Jan 2023, after a system restart I had the forced upgrade from Monterey to Sonoma despite my settings being not to allow automatic updates. I'd been swithering about updating to Ventura too. Ha ha. Well done Apple.

BDAqua wrote:

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

Not going there!

At any rate, the situation appears to be resolved. The last and final hiccup was an undetectable "Install macOS" app on the machine I used to make my bootable installer. I managed to fix that by moving it to /tmp and restarting. Then Apple's supersuperroot was able to delete it.

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

Also confirming that I was forced an update today. I am on an Intel i7 Mac Mini 2019. I did NOT intend to update to Sonoma just yet due to software issues with Logic Pro using legacy software but was planning on doing it later. Tonight the same notification popped up like always asking if I wanted to upgrade to Sonoma (from Monterey). And again I clicked "no" as usual. Whilst in an open project in Logic, a notification suddenly pops up that my Mac will restart in 60 seconds with a countdown. I had no alternative choices. Then Mac went through it's 10 minute update which appeared normal. I thought maybe I missed a system update. When everything came back online, I was suddenly flying over Sonoma county with vineyards below. This is infuriating! Now a handful of legacy plugins I had purchased to use with Logic no longer work and a series of projects I had saved in Logic no longer open because those legacy plugins are missing or can't be found. Thanks a lot Apple!

"You can never be too rich, or have too many backups."

Because stuff happens...

In my haste to restore my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro last night, I inadvertently erased the USB-C stick clone, instead of the primary SSD while attempting to erase and restore it.

So I discovered that I also had to create a bootable Monterey USB stick, because Recovery insisted on installing Ventura on that computer, not Monterey.

So, still restoring data from the 2nd backup device (of 4 other devices, including both Time Machine and Bombich backups.)

BDAqua wrote:

killall Dock

For those keeping score at home, you'll need to restart at some point after this command. I had assumed it would be like relaunching the Finder. Supposedly these system tasks automatically restart themselves. Not this one.

I did go ahead and do the other two commands, but the otherwise the UI was pretty useless without the Dock, so I restarted. Spotlight is still doing its reindex after the restart. Hopefully my apps come back after it completes.

Knock on wood ... this has not happened to me (...yet). But I did a bit of investigating on my own iMac today (Intel i9, Monterey 12.7.2).

I have two accounts, both admin, let's call them A and B. The A account is the first one created when I installed the iMac and is where I do all my truly system admin work (installs, updates, etc.)

In the A account, when I checked Software Update the only option I had enabled was Check for Updates. I disabled (unchecked) Check for Updates, the text greyed out, I clicked OK and no longer had any indication of any available updates, Sonoma or otherwise. Also, the System Preferences icon on my Dock lost its little red indicator showing any updates available.

Rebooted the iMac, logged back into account A, there was no red indicator on System Preferences; I opened Software Update, there was no text or graphics whatsoever about any updates. It was clearly not checking anything. Cool, I thought.

Then I logged out of account A and logged into account B. Lo and behold the System Preferences icon on that Dock had its little red indicator showing, as did the Software Update icon in System Preferences. When I opened Software Update I found that both Check for Updates and Download new updates when available were both checked. (I had probably not unchecked them previously.) I unchecked both ... and this time the text for Check for Updates remained black (it did not grey out even though it was unchecked). I went in & out of this a few times and despite disabling Check for Updates the system checks anyway.

I then logged out of account B and went back to account A. NOW, even in account A, although Check for Updates is unchecked, the text is also black (not grey) and the system checks for updates regardless. I suspect the black text is an indicator that checking for updates is actually still enabled. (I also shut down & restarted to see if that made any difference; it did not.)

So, clearly something is amiss in the system's settings (at a minimum regarding Check for Updates).

Among other things, it proved to me that each user account has its own full set of preferences. And it would appear that if you have multiple user accounts on a Mac you should make sure to disable Software Update in all accounts.

Yup.

Happened to me as well last week. Thanks Apple!

To whom do I send the bill for 14 hrs of work trying to and failing to revert to a Time Machine backup, then having to format the drive, reset the machine to factory OS, upgrade to Monterey, update to most recent version and then install all applications I had on my system?