3mstrrktek7 wrote:
Apples notification box to upgrade keeps coming up even though I've told it not to in the settings.
You cannot disable this notification.
Anyone have an answer for Apple to STOP doing this???
No. And it's important to point out that any suggestion you find on the internet for this is wrong - without exception.
However, even though some are wrong, some are less wrong than others and/or merely outdated.
Run the following in the Terminal:
defaults read com.apple.SoftwareUpdate
And save the output somewhere. Then, the next time you get a notification, choose "remind me later" or whatever to dismiss it. Then run that above command again and compare the results from the previous run. That may give you a hint about how you can hack it.
For example, when I run that command, I get the following:
{
AutoUpdateMajorOSVersion = 15;
AvailableUpdatesNotificationCountKey = 1;
AvailableUpdatesNotificationProductKey = "MSU_UPDATE_25F84_patch_26.5.2_major";
MajorOSUserNotificationDate = "2025-03-10 15:41:17 +0000";
UserNotificationDate = "2026-07-13 18:46:16 +0000";
}
The "MajorOSUserNotificationDate" is from one of those incorrect internet suggestions I mentioned above. You may be able to update "UserNotificationDate" to fool the system into think that you've already been nagged. But the trick is to wait and compare the values from before and after so you know how often you need to hack the value.
What you want to do is hack the value so that it's more recent than it really was. It's not going to nag you every day. So if you keep updating it every day to whatever the previous day was, that might, in theory, prevent future nags. But you have to wait to see what the official window is so that you can test it and confirm that this is actually working.
To change the value, run the following Terminal command (using a suitably recent date from whenever "now" is in the future):
defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate UserNotificationDate -date "2026-07-15 22:22:2 +0000"
Don't try to be clever and make it some date in the future. Apple is aware of this hack and will fight it. (You can try to be clever, just make sure that you run it like 3 times as described so that you know the Apple's delay, and you can confirm that your hack works. Then try a future date and see if that still works.)
I don't know if this will work. And if it does work, it will only block the notification, not the badge on System Preferences. (Although there are other hacks to block that.)
Also note that Apple will sometimes simply force-upgrade you. This happened to me once. Not fun. Making it even more delightful was the fact that my Time Machine restore didn't seem to work. I have some systems (such as Git) that maintain their own checksums. Git was not happy after the Time Machine restore. I don't know what was going on there, but it freaked me out.
I now recommend doing manual restores using iCloud. Wipe the computer and install the OS version you want. Then log in to your iCloud account and let iCloud populate everything. Manually restore any files or documents that you don't keep in iCloud. Sometimes this is tricky. You can download all your email again. But if you have any mailboxes "On My Mac", you'll need to manually re-import them. And since we're having so much fun already, you should note that Apple Mail's "mbox" default export format no longer works. It will fail to reimport about 5% of messages. Instead, import from an old "~/Library/Mail/V10" folder that you've manually saved. Do this only for "On my Mac" mailboxes.
Alas, I'm not done. Should you get force-upgraded, the easiest way to restore is using DFU. You'll need another computer for this. You may be able to use the Finder on the other computer, but the most reliable way is to use the "Apple Configurator" app. And as you might guess by now, this too, is tricky. Make sure to download an appropriate version of Apple Configurator for the DFU host. Apple keeps this tool regularly updated, so when you want to use it to flash a computer back to an old OS version, you might need to first upgrade the other computer, the DFU host, to the very latest bug-filled version if you don't have an old version of Apple Configurator.
You can also use a USB restore drive. If you don't have a second computer, now's the time to make sure you have that restore drive created when you need it later.
