If you’re among those who do not want to upgrade to macOS 10.13, MacPerformanceGuide.com has put together a quick guide to disabling the downloading of High Sierra. Check out the instructions below:
Open a Terminal window, and paste in the following, including the trailing quote character. (Note, you will need to head over to the original article to copy and paste the command properly):
What this does is create two small locked files with the same name as the installer and the temporary download filename, thus preventing macOS from downloading the installer into that location. There should be two locked files that look like this:
When and if the time comes to upgrade to High Sierra, simply throw these two files in the trash, then proceed with the upgrade.
Related: macOS Reversion: How to Downgrade from High Sierra
Hat tip to Lloyd Chambers and MacPerformanceGuide for this trick!
“Are you out of your Vulken mind?” – Captain Kirk
You realize using chflags is completely convoluted, right? No? Huh? Really?
If I was a Terminal geek I wouldn’t have posted the comment, I would know already what to do.
I just lost Safari on my Sierra OS. I can’t get it to open. Apple has stolen it with my bookmarks etc. The only thing it will let me do is get another Safari with OS High Sierra. Blackmail! This is quite immoral. I hate Apple and will buy no more of these. Seven was enough. Once a good company now a robber baron and enemy of mankind.
Great article! This made me aware that I have a 5.21GB bloatware file on my laptop. Now I have to get rid of this before something wakes this bloatware up and makes my Adobe apps malfunction!!
Can’t remove the app neither rm or rmdir will kill it. Can’t unlock or change permissions on file.
MacPro:Applications dad$ rm /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app
rm: /Applications/Install macOS High Sierra.app: is a directory
MacPro:Applications dad$ rmdir /Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app
rmdir: /Applications/Install macOS High Sierra.app: Operation not permitted
There is also other method to prevent automatic unwanted installations: disable it, installing manually.
I’m still running El Capitan on both my MacBook and iMac. I’d like to install Sierra on my MacBook first and try that out first. I’m having a problem finding the Sierra installer for some reason. I’m obviously not an “early adopter” if I’m this far behind, but I’d still rather bump up to 10.12 before going all-out with High Sierra. Any suggestions?
if you never downloaded macOS 10.12 sierra with your apple id in the app store before, there is unfortunately no chance after the release of a newer operating system to get older versions. I downloaded every release of macOS since 10.9, therefore I can download all versions since then again if I want to. as I said, if you never used your apple id to download macOS sierra at least once, you can only ask friends, who did it and download with their macs the installation package and copy it to your mac. furthermore for sierra you must use a special “hidden” link: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202
You can download older versions of OS X here: hackintosh.computer/199/direct-download-macos/
Your blogging software changed the simple double quotes to fancy quotes which breaks the command.
Good catch, Joe! I have updated the article and pointed readers to the original.