Tips: If you're holding off on macOS High Sierra, turn off upgrade notifications for good

Posted:
in macOS edited October 2020
Every time you boot a computer capable of upgrading to High Sierra, macOS will pop up at least one notification a day exhorting you to move up. Here's how to turn them off for good, with one Terminal command.




While we at AppleInsider generally recommend upgrading to High Sierra, there are some cases where you might not want to. A home server setup immediately comes to mind, as does a 4,1 Mac Pro with the firmware flashed to 5,1.

Here's how to stop them on El Capitan and Sierra, courtesy OS X Daily.

Open the Terminal in the Utilities folder.




Enter sudo mv /Library/Bundles/OSXNotification.bundle ~/Documents/ and authenticate with your password. Depending on your OS revision, and user permissions, you may or may not get the warning as shown.




The command will execute unceremoniously. Reboot and you won't get update notifications again!

This procedure doesn't preclude installing High Sierra, you can still select it from the App Store. But, it will prevent the notifications from bothering you on a machine that you aren't planning to upgrade -- or just can't.
dysamoriairelandcornchip
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 37
    I’ll never upgrade because of older Adobe software incompatibility. Sierra was the end of the road for me.
    maciekskontaktarthurbadysamoriacornchip
  • Reply 2 of 37
    philboogiephilboogie Posts: 7,675member
    Top Tip! Now, how to make my iPhone stop badgering me with updates? Or 'finishing setup' because I've disabled FaceID?
    sdw2001arthurbadysamoriairelandcgWerkscornchip
  • Reply 3 of 37
    Thanks for this. I've held off because I'm still using Final Cut Express 3.5. Installing it on an Intel machine requires running package commands at the Unix prompt (because the installer is PowerPC), but the Application runs just fine. However, it will no longer launch on my laptop running High Sierra so I've left my Mac Mini at Sierra.

    In a few months I plan to move to Final Cut X (which I'm dreading because of its iMovie-like timeline), so I'll finally upgrade my other Mac to 10.13.
  • Reply 4 of 37
    gustavgustav Posts: 827member
    I’ll never upgrade because of older Adobe software incompatibility. Sierra was the end of the road for me.
    Even when Sierra stops getting security updates in a few years? Living dangerously, my friend.

    That said, I wish Apple would slow down a bit. Every year is getting to be a pain.
    cornchip
  • Reply 5 of 37
    sdw2001sdw2001 Posts: 18,015member
    Top Tip! Now, how to make my iPhone stop badgering me with updates? Or 'finishing setup' because I've disabled FaceID?
    Or Apple Pay.  I finally did it just to shut off the damn notification.  
    cornchip
  • Reply 6 of 37
    slurpyslurpy Posts: 5,382member
    Top Tip! Now, how to make my iPhone stop badgering me with updates? Or 'finishing setup' because I've disabled FaceID?

    I assume you're running iOS11, so why wouldn't you want to run the latest release?
  • Reply 7 of 37
    gustav said:
    I’ll never upgrade because of older Adobe software incompatibility. Sierra was the end of the road for me.
    Even when Sierra stops getting security updates in a few years? Living dangerously, my friend.

    That said, I wish Apple would slow down a bit. Every year is getting to be a pain.
    When you are behind firewall and do not use it to acces extrenal sites which may be policy in your company blocking your computer then you do not get exposed to this risk. And yes you can get updates and upgrades without access to Internet from target computer. I am not going to download Sierra or High Sierra from all my network computers to upgrade them while wasting bandwidth - I downloaded them once (installer lands in Application folder) denied access to continue installation and put that donwloaded file on network for reduistribution between computers).

    Also Adobe CS 6 requires Java 6 installation with that infamous special package from Apple. CC is another story and Adobe needs to figure out license verification on demand rather than on their schedule (people may be working remotely in places with no access to their servers validating licenses - this subject was discussed on Adobe forums. This is the reason people still stay with unsupported CS 6 and honestly I do not allow any background automatic downloads and installations to ANY software on computers and especially to Adobe (that's plain dumb and risky idea to run enterprise and every administrator will tell you that).
    edited January 2018 arthurbadysamoria
  • Reply 8 of 37
    A suggestion to author: Please publish trick to install High Sierra without converting file system to APFS and stayng with HFS+. I know there is command line for this to start installer. It was circulating on Internet. Many applications stopped working because of new file system and I do not plan to allow this convertion to happen and risk damage to commercial applications run for our business. I appreciate advancements in that space but I am opting out untill all software vendors flush out their issue, policies and solutions and this can take few years.
    arthurba
  • Reply 9 of 37
    Wow, this seems like a great idea. Enjoy Meltdown and Spectre.
  • Reply 10 of 37
    gustav said:
    I’ll never upgrade because of older Adobe software incompatibility. Sierra was the end of the road for me.
    Even when Sierra stops getting security updates in a few years? Living dangerously, my friend.

    That said, I wish Apple would slow down a bit. Every year is getting to be a pain.
    I really don't mind if the changes are substantive. But they have been, for the most part, stylistic, and for me many of those stylistic changes have been steps back. Same is true with the iOS updates (for instance, the new iPad virtual keyboard in iOS11 had to be most utterly crappy, POS keyboard I've used in my life).

    Just seems like a lot of 'busy work' is being thrown at the iOS/MacOS/tvOS/WatchOS folks.

    Apple needs to fundamentally rethink its software upgrade strategy. It's pretty much like Microsoft used to be, at this point: intrusive and annoying.
    dysamoriacgWerks
  • Reply 11 of 37
    If you were here I would kiss you
  • Reply 12 of 37
    Many applications stopped working because of new file system 
    Could you elaborate on this one please?
    cornchip
  • Reply 13 of 37
    gustav said:
    I’ll never upgrade because of older Adobe software incompatibility. Sierra was the end of the road for me.
    Even when Sierra stops getting security updates in a few years? Living dangerously, my friend.

    That said, I wish Apple would slow down a bit. Every year is getting to be a pain.
    I think within a few more years it will be possible to replace most functions of the desktop with a top of the line iPad. I'm not too concerned.
  • Reply 14 of 37
    Wow, this seems like a great idea. Enjoy Meltdown and Spectre.
    Enjoy your 20% slower computer.

    Depending on workload naturally, but the microcode changes to resolve Spectre variant 2 have can significantly degrade performance.  Intel are advising customers that future processors with fixes for Spectre will have the 'feature' disabled by default and it should only be enabled discretionally by the customer.  Crazy.  
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/22/intel_spectre_fix_linux/
    dysamoriacornchip
  • Reply 15 of 37
    Does anyone know the specific reason why the author mentions "4,1 Mac Pro with the firmware flashed to 5,1".  I looked around on the web and don't see any issues with people who flashed a 4,1 to 5,1 and then upgraded to High Sierra.
    cornchip
  • Reply 16 of 37
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,858administrator
    tzmmtz said:
    Does anyone know the specific reason why the author mentions "4,1 Mac Pro with the firmware flashed to 5,1".  I looked around on the web and don't see any issues with people who flashed a 4,1 to 5,1 and then upgraded to High Sierra.
    Because the 5,1 flashed units get another firmware update during the High Sierra update process and it doesn't always succeed if you don't have an EFI video card installed.

    There's a hack to circumvent it, but it can be a pain.
    edited January 2018 cornchip
  • Reply 17 of 37
    Ok. Good to know.  I don't have any plans to update the 10+ Mac Pro's I support as servers from Sierra to High Sierra due to Apple dumbing down the Server software.  You can clearly see they want out of the Mac server room at SMB's. Instead pushing everything to the cloud. Big issue is their services are now focused on the home user. 
  • Reply 18 of 37
    cgWerkscgWerks Posts: 2,952member
    Top Tip! Now, how to make my iPhone stop badgering me with updates? Or 'finishing setup' because I've disabled FaceID?
    No doubt... or even stop with a UI designed to trick people into updating overnight!

    I guess I don't care about being reminded to update to a new OS, but I'd appreciate they at least wait until it's past beta. ;)
  • Reply 19 of 37
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    How about a way to stop iOS from nagging me daily to install iOS 11 on my iPhone 6s?? How about a way to delete the unwanted 3.6GB waste of space on my iPhone 4 that is the iOS 7 installer that i will NEVER EVER run?? I do NOT want to be bullied to change my devices on Apple's schedule. I also hate how each successive iOS version is more bloated and introduces more bugs. I discover new iOS bugs on an almost daily basis, at this point (yes, i report them all to Apple, but they don't care). Apple's QA seems barely extent, or they have only one full-time programmer in house... As far as I'm concerned, the Apple that won me away from Windows/PC between 2007 and 2009 is almost dead.

    Also, i see that the forum still causes the page to scroll to the bottom when using arrow keys to move the insertion point (iOS). This has been spreading around the internet as every forum updates to the version(s) with the trigger for this bug/behavior. Is anyone ever going to fix this in iOS or on forum software??
    tokyojimu
  • Reply 20 of 37
    cgWerkscgWerks Posts: 2,952member

    anantksundaram said:
    I really don't mind if the changes are substantive. But they have been, for the most part, stylistic, and for me many of those stylistic changes have been steps back. Same is true with the iOS updates (for instance, the new iPad virtual keyboard in iOS11 had to be most utterly crappy, POS keyboard I've used in my life). 

    Just seems like a lot of 'busy work' is being thrown at the iOS/MacOS/tvOS/WatchOS folks.

    Apple needs to fundamentally rethink its software upgrade strategy. It's pretty much like Microsoft used to be, at this point: intrusive and annoying.
    Yep, same experience here. While a feature here or there (and security updates) push me to keep updating, I feel like the last several releases have been like 1 step forward, 5 steps back, or something like that.

    mojo66 said:
    Many applications stopped working because of new file system 
    Could you elaborate on this one please?
    I'm not sure which apps anymore, but when it first came out, several major apps had data-destructive issues they were scrambling to fix due to the file system. I'd *assume* most of the big ones have fixed it by now (the couple I use were), but I suppose lesser-known apps could still be an issue.
    dysamoria
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