How to Stop macOS Upgrade Notifications
Instead, you get harassed by frequent notifications imploring you to “Upgrade to macOS Sonoma”, notifications that won’t take no for an answer. They don’t even have no for an answer! And if you click the wrong thing, you’ll accidentally, silently install Sonoma.
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The solution in this case is actually quite simple, one little Terminal command:
defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate MajorOSUserNotificationDate -date "2025-02-07 23:22:47 +0000"
Previously:
Update (2024-02-14): Howard Oakley:
Although a detailed analysis by Adam Engst on TidBITS laid the blame on what could only have been a serious bug in the upgrade notification, I’ve had reports from users who insist that they never saw or dismissed that.
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For Macs with more than one user, that key-value pair must be set in each user’s ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist to ensure the notification doesn’t occur.
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If those forced upgrades had been initiated independently of that notification, as some accounts imply, then blocking its appearance wouldn’t have prevented the upgrade from occurring.
See also: Ric Ford.
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sonomablocker - https://github.com/Theile/sonomablocker might be useful as well.
I was bitten by this too, broke my VMWare Fusion install due to this bug, which only affects VoiceOver/Full Keyboard Access users. Now I'm on the latest Sonoma beta which finally fixes it.
Is this forced Sonoma upgrade still going on? I think it's scandalous, frankly, and I'm astonished it didn't get more coverage in the tech press (or maybe I'm not, given they've probably all breathlessly upgraded).
As someone who inadvertently installed Sonoma on a Mac by interacting with that goofy notification, this is wildly useful, so thank you! I'm going to cover this next week for our readers (giving both of you a shoutout of course), cheers.