Disabling Daily Upgrade Reminder

[Allen Davis]

I'm stubbornly clinging to my mid-2010 iMac (iMac 11,2), mainly due to budgetary limits.

Nevertheless, I really wanted the ability to run Mojave on this machine, which is unsupported. I installed the "DOS guy" patches and all, and it runs macOS Mojave 10.14.5 like a sewing machine, and all features are functional (some machines have issues with Dark Mode and grayed-out menus, as well as some other display issues).

I guess I'm lucky.

However, I get a daily reminder than an update (to Mojave 10.14.6) is available, and I have the option of putting it off for an hour, or a "remind me tomorrow" option.

I was a little fearful of doing the upgrade, because I wasn't confident that the patches I'd installed would support the upgraded version of Mojave. Nonetheless, I eventually gave in to the annoying reminder and decided to take the plunge.

After I upgraded to Mojave 10.14.6, my Mac refused to boot, so I finally had to resort to wiping the internal drive completely and restoring it from one of my clones. And believe me, doing a restore from a Firewire 800 drive is not fast at all. Thank God I didn't have to use the USB 2.0 bus!

Is there some way I can permanently disable this daily reminder? It's annoying.

 

[rule r]

I also hate the reminder and don't need to update most applications. Now I have Catalina on my desk top, which I definitly don't want, and I don't know how to get rid of it.

 

[Allen Davis]

I like Catalina a lot, and I'm still learning some of its new features. But I only have Catalina on my 2012 i7 MacBook Pro.

(A word or several about my MBP: I love this laptop almost like a child. It was the last user-upgradeable laptop, and I got the one with the super-fast i7 processor, which is definitely faster and more powerful that the i5 CPU that came standard on most MBPs that year. It operates at 2.9GHz, and supposedly turbo-boosts up to about 3.6GHz, but I have serious doubts that it ever goes that high. Coupled with the 16GB RAM upgrade I installed, plus the OWC Mercury 6G SSD, this laptop boots cold in 15-18 seconds. While I don't do much video work on this machine to speak of, it's more than capable of some pretty Herculean work if called on. I live in fear and dread of next September when Apple will likely relegate this model to its dustbin "obsolete" list, and will no longer be able to keep this machine up-to-date OS-wise. I've seen and used several of Apple's newer laptops, including the 2017 MBP, and I don't think any of them have anything going for them that's compelling enough to make me lust after one of them. End of boastful rant.)

I was delighted to learn about the DOS guy workaround in patching Mojave to a lot of unsupported Macs, and I proceeded in performing this "upgrade" with a lot of caution.

Thankfully, I didn't have any of the hiccups or unusable features that many other people experienced, and it's been rock-solid stable. All the while, I've been able to keep using Adobe Photoshop CS6, although InDesign no longer works, and Illustrator is quirky and usually fails to load its own extensions, making Illustrator CS6 limited to basically the old Version 10.x.

I'd just love it if I could get those annoying upgrade notifications turned off. Even when I tell it to "remind me tomorrow," I'll often get two, three, and sometimes even FOUR more urgings in just a few hours.

I was hoping somebody might know how I might even go into Terminal and tweak the thing into submission.

 

[rule r]

Yes, many of us would like to get rid of the upgrade notifications! I still want to know how to get Catalina off my desktop. I do not want to install it and lose my adobe applications.

 

[Allen Davis]

The only way I know of doing what you want is to reformat your startup drive, provided of course, you have a very, very recent backup or clone, preferably the latter.

I use CarbonCopyClone about once a week, or more often when I'm doing a lot of writing or lecture preparation. CCC allows you to create bootable clones of your startup drives, but in your case, you'd only want to do a selective backup of your own files before proceeding.

If you use Techtool Pro, you can (and should have) a bootable partition on a backup disk called an "eDrive."

After you reformat your drive, run Disk First Aid on it, and then reformat it again, just for giggles. (I've had to do that myself in days gone by.) For some reason, the Installer refused to believe I'd formatted my drive as APFS, so I had to do it again. And I think I've heard of other people having the same kink.

You should be able to find a downloadable version of Mojave somewhere on Apple's website of the App Store (I don't remember which since I haven't had to download an older OS for several years).

Once you have all your valuable files backed up (redundantly), you're going to have to rape and burn and pillage your drive to get your previous OS installed.

 

[Allen Davis]

I also hate the reminder and don't need to update most applications. Now I have Catalina on my desk top, which I definitly don't want, and I don't know how to get rid of it.

I stumbled across this link from Other World Computing that may help you more than anything I posted before.

Give it a look and see. 54622-how-to-downgrade-from-macos-catalina-to-mojave-or-earlier

I'm a huge fan of OWC and have been a very satisfied customer of theirs for more than 20 years. You might want to check out some the SSDs they have, and enclosures as well. I use their drives and their Mercury On-The-Go clear acrylic enclosures for all of my clone drives. They can be found at macsales.com

 

[Allen Davis]

Yes, many of us would like to get rid of the upgrade notifications! I still want to know how to get Catalina off my desktop. I do not want to install it and lose my adobe applications.

I reluctantly gave up my Adobe apps when I upgraded my MBP to Catalina, but Catalina had a bunch of features I really wanted, and besides, I can still run Photoshop CS5 on my iMac.

I've said it before a thousand times: I'm never going to rent software from anyone! One day, I'll have to leave CS5 behind. Hopefully, I'll have climbed the learning curves for Pixelmator and a new vector app I installed on my laptop by that time. And there's always Lemke's GraphicConverter, which is a pretty good powerhouse in its own right.