“If you’re running macOS 10.12 Sierra or earlier, and do not want to upgrade to 10.13 High Sierra right now, be careful because Apple has started pushing High Sierra to older Macs and making it all too easy to upgrade inadvertently,” Adam C. Engst writes for TidBits. “In short, if you get a macOS notification asking you to install High Sierra, click the Details button to launch the App Store app, and then quit it.”
I realized this was happening because I’m testing Watchman Monitoring, an app and service… [that] sits in the background, looking for events of interest on a Mac and notifying the consultant, MSP, or IT admin who’s responsible for keeping that Mac running,” Engst writes. “I have Watchman keeping an eye on all of our Macs, my parents’ Macs, and my aunt and uncle’s Macs — in other words, the Macs that I’ll have to fix if something goes wrong.”
“The first hint was an email from Watchman Monitoring telling me that my aunt’s Mac had started downloading the High Sierra installer. I was surprised, since she’s quite capable on her Mac but never undertakes major upgrades without asking me first,” Engst writes. “[Then], I received additional messages from Watchman telling me that my father’s and uncle’s Macs had also downloaded High Sierra. That was too many simultaneous instances to be anything but an automatic push from Apple.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is a bit dangerous because they type of users who’ll click “Install” are the most likely to have not backed up, so if anything goes wrong… Hopefully, your last Time Machine backup survives any calamity.
Apple should do some work on that dialog box, at least, to make it clearer what will happen if you install, and to perhaps add an option to “Wait until later” or change “Details” to provide some more clarity.
Yes! It installed on my computer and it froze! I restored from Time Machine but now I have to run Disk Utility Repair every time I start up! This upgrade is dangerous!
Did you authorize the upgrade? The only correct answer is “yes.”
Apple will preemptively download software installers to facilitate a software upgrade, but I have never experienced Apple bypassing the administrator authorization step.
Think before you click. If it is an OS upgrade, think twice. Then ensure that you have multiple backups. Then proceed with caution.
By that measure, millions of users have only themselves to blame for “upgrading” to Windows 10 due to a series of dialog prompts that got more and more misleading over several months.
This merely follows the trend of Apple forcefully downloading iOS updates on us; a few years ago it downloaded automatically when we were on wifi, taking up space and bandwidth we didn’t necessarily have (it was either the iOS 7 or iOS 8 upgrade that blew my uncle’s meagre data cap when we were visiting; I had to delete it to make space for taking more photos, and no way was I upgrading without a backup at home!). They seem to have backed off on that with more recent versions.
Now there’s hints they’re extending the practice to macOS. I expect much better from Apple than to embrace some of the worst of Microsoft’s behaviour.
This is BS! Apple is NOT PUSHING ANYONE to update their Mac’s OS! IF you had your family’s computers set up right in the first place then you would not need Watchman or any other monitoring! Quit trying to be a Windows PC I.T. Clown and all your family’s Macs will be fine without your help.
Wrong. You can’t get out of the upgrade dialogue box without accepting the upgrade. As another commenter pointed out you are forced into the AppStore and only then can you opt out. I had this issue last week on my MacBook. I cancelled the update in the AppStore but I was somewhat taken aback by Apple’s aggressive approach.
I concur with the MDN Take, in general. Apple should improve the dialog box and, perhaps, add a warning to ensure that your data is backed up.
But, then, there is also personal responsibility. At some point, you cannot save people from themselves.
I haven’t upgraded to High Sierra yet because one application that I need to be able to use for at least another 12 months is FileMaker Pro 12. I don’t want to buy a new version because it would be yet another incremental upgrade of FP at the full price and I’ve gradually switched away to using other solutions for new work, but I still need to keep using FMP 12 to open my older databases.
Is there any way of finding out if FMP 12 will run on OS 10.13 without all the hassle of installing it and then finding out the hard way?
When I contacted Filemaker to ask if FMP 12 will still run on the latest version of OS X, I was told that they recommend the latest version of FMP – which is an answer to a different question to the one I asked.
With that “non-answer” and if no-one else has tested it, install High Sierra on a spare drive and test it.
I would check the FileMaker forums, someone there has probably tested it already.
A LOT of FileMaker developers have moved to Xojo (formerly REALbasic) after FileMaker licensing costs became prohibitive for small developers, Tim Dietrich being a prominent example. His blog makes for interesting reading, and can still be found in the internet archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20170331035030/http://timdietrich.me:80/blog/goodbye-filemaker
Tim Dietrich and Hal Gumbert developed two VERY impressive frameworks (Xanadu and Aloe) that especially together work very well for FileMaker developers – see https://campsoftware.com/products/xanadu-for-xojo.php
Hope that helps in your transition.
Xojo is not for me with a license at $700 per year for use on IOS, but thanks for the suggestion.
It’s not $700, it’s $299. Which is cheaper than FileMaker.
$699 is for the Pro version which includes Desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux), Web, Raspberry Pi, iOS and next year Android (though I should add that iOS is the weakest part) and is a perpetual license which still works after your one year of upgrades has passed – so not exactly yearly.
It also let’s you use PostGres, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, Valentina, CubeSQL etc.
Compare that to FileMaker and it’s Server price, where the server actually requires your users to have FileMaker too, severely restricting your market, and making the FileMaker solution very expensive.
We’ve used both. In the end the lab I worked in (15 licenses and one advanced license for me, but no server license) balked at FileMakers price gouging and we wrote a solution using Xojo. Which allowed us much more freedom, and cost a fraction of what a FileMaker upgrade would have cost us. We can’t imagine going back to FileMaker.
P.S. Have a look at Xanadu which lets you develop FileMaker like solutions
https://github.com/campsoftware/Xojo-Xanadu
FMP might run but the installer might not. I was using FMP 11 and had a system crash. Even though the software itself still worked (before the crash) the installer wouldn’t run so I’ll have to upgrade.
I don’t want to go to High Sierra until the new file system is available for my fusion drive iMac.
Mountaineer’s don’t start climbing without checking all gear twice, at least.
OS upgrades are just a dangerous, because they can waste days when things go “downhill.”
Apps & utilities needing updates, failed installs, & corruption mean there is NO SUCH THING as a “safe upgrade.”
Would be a major problem for me because I work remotely and my company is not yet signing VPN for High Sierra, so if an inadvertent update happens I would have to mail my laptop to IT and wait for it to be returned to me reimaged before I could continue working.
I’m holding back on High Sierra on all three of my Macs:
The Fusion-Drive iMac is also running an old PC program through WINE. I’m concerned about both being messed up, though more especially the WINE program.
The 2010 iMac in the office is still running the business’s website through iWeb. I’ve heard EverWeb or something similar can carry through with iWeb, but I don’t want the hassle of losing iWeb or reinstalling the program to some new software and all the glitches that are bound to happen.
The 2010 PowerBook… can’t remember why not now.
Finally I gave up iWeb. It’s too old. I switched to Flux 7, currently cheap in this Bundle: https://macappware.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=70e0439598863744f193550ec&id=1abd493c75&e=29d551f5e5
I’ve been using an older version of Logic Pro for years and High Seirra killed it!! It says to upgrade for $199. Thanks, Tim
This is one of the frustrations of using Macs. The hardware lasts forever, but all too there comes a time when your expensive applications will no longer run on the latest version of OS X.
I’ve lost count of the number of applications I’ve had to upgrade for significant sums of money or perfectly functional hardware which I’ve had to replace because the drivers or support software will no longer work on newer versions of OS X. Some applications get abandoned by their developers and there is no longer any version available for the latest OS.
I’ve got a collection of older Mac laptops running various operating systems ( including OS9 on PPC ) so that I can still occasionally use software or hardware which I stopped using for new work many years ago.
Apple is always looking to the future and wanting us to embrace change, but when we use our Macs as tools for creative work, we also need to be able to go back and access files which we originally created when we designed and built stuff using our Macs. I still need to maintain or upgrade equipment which I built more than thirty years ago. That was before universal formats like PDF even existed. As a result, many of the files which I need are in proprietary formats and can only be opened within those original applications – which of course will not run on new Macs. I then save those files as PDFs for the future, but I don’t have the time to convert every file that I ever created.
I’ve got very comprehensive backups of everything I’ve done for decades, but having a backup of a file is of no use if I can no longer open that file.
To the author of this article: This is BS! Apple is NOT PUSHING ANYONE to update their Mac’s OS! IF you had your family’s computers set up right in the first place then you would not need Watchman or any other monitoring! Quit trying to be a Windows PC I.T. Clown and all your family’s Macs will be fine without your help.
I haven’t read the full article so forgive me if this is addressed in there but isn’t this subject to a setting in System Preferences under the App Store prefs? Under ‘Automatically check for updates there’s an option for ‘Download newly available updates in the background’ with the subtext ‘You will be notified when the updates are ready to be installed’. There’s an additional option to install MacOS updates automatically.
Wouldn’t unchecking these stop this from happening?
Yes that setting is there. In fact there are several options to choose from.
I just checked SystemsPrefs, and I had mine setup to download updates in the background but notify me when updates were ready to install. I thought “why take chances” and I unchecked everything except checking for updates.
I would love to upgrade to High Sierra, but I’m a headshot photographer and Capture One Pro is my software of choice for tethering to my camera. I use version 9 (v10 is current) — paid full price ($279) so I wanted to get a couple years out of it. They aren’t sure they’ll support future OSes even though it’s only one generation old. I either have to spend $99 to upgrade or get on yet another damn subscription plan to update as v9 has issues with the new macOS.
Not good. I have software that won’t operate under HS do this would be a Disaster if I did make this error. Hopefully it’s not as ‘malicious’ as this article would like to have us believe.
To the author of this article: This is BS! Apple is NOT PUSHING ANYONE to update their Mac’s OS! IF you had your family’s computers set up right in the first place then you would not need Watchman or any other monitoring! Quit trying to be a Windows PC I.T. Clown and all your family’s Macs will be fine without your help.
This is BS! Apple is NOT PUSHING ANYONE to update their Mac’s OS! IF you had your family’s computers set up right in the first place then you would not need Watchman or any other monitoring! Quit trying to be a Windows PC I.T. Clown and all your family’s Macs will be fine without your help.
yep, unprompted install and upgrade that killed at least one pricey non-64 bit program so far (Final Draft). can’t wait to see what else has been now rendered totally unusable. thanks, Timbo!
Yes, if you turn off updates you will not see this.
But it would be nice to see the patches for all the other Apple apps.
The problem is the choices in the App Store preferences.
A- Automatically check for updates: Gotta have this on so you get system data files and security updates.
B- Install system data files and security updates: Check this to get this.
Now what do you do?
If you want other app updates you have to check “Download newly available updates in the background.”
— The problem with the above choice is it appears to not differentiate between patches and a full High Sierra download. This is what I have a problem with.
Apple could fix this very easily by adding a third choice to the Notification window: Install, Details and “NO”, and when I click NO it means never bother me again. So sick of the constant nagging to upgrade. (same thing on iOS)
Factor in average users, new users, elderly users. They click Details, then the App Store open with a whole bunch of stuff that most likely overwhelms them. They don’t realize that just quitting it will make it go away. For a day to two, then it nags them again and again and again. Not cool Apple. Fix this shit.
They’ve lately been overly aggressive in pushing iOS updates as well. It takes effort to not upgrade iOS with their frequent reminders and all visual cues pointing towards updating. I think this is a shame when introducing such sloppy software updates as 11.0 that seem almost universally regretted. It doesn’t help that they stop signing the better prior software so soon after new releases, preventing users from correcting their mistake.
Yes. I managed to get rid of the reminders by deleting the download off my phone. That works for about 3-5 days and then it starts nagging again. But it does not auto download it again.
There should be a “NO” button and then it should NEVER ask again.
APPLE!
Finish APFS first!
Then we’ll talk.
Apple needs to release macOS upgrades every few years in my opinion. Every 2 years might be a good thing. Like it use to be a half dozen years ago. I would be willing to even pay for the OS like it used to be. Oh well…