My Mac upgraded to Sequoia without my permission?!?

nightchef wrote:

I've been running my 2023 Mac Studio M2 Max on Ventura. Yes, I know that's two OS versions behind, but I'm using my Mac for music production and stability is more important to me than being up to date.

This morning I saw a notification to update Ventura to 13.7.1. Here's the weird part: I didn't click on the update link, because I was in the middle of something. I was going to get to it later.

Maybe 10 minutes later, I saw a notice that Software Update was going to restart my Mac. This puzzled me, since I hadn't responded to the notification, but it never occurred to me that the update could be anything but 13.7.1, since the system had *just* prompted me about that.

15 minutes later, my Mac rebooted...in Sequoia. :-o

I was never given an opportunity to consent to this OS upgrade, and certainly would not have done so, since most of the music software I use every day has not announced Sequoia compatibility yet.

Has this happened to anyone else? Has anyone tried downgrading? How big a PITA was it? (I could restore from a backup, but TBH it's been a bit too long since my last system drive backup, so this wouldn't be ideal.)

Turn off automatic updates

>Settings>General?Software Update

if your settings are correct and you still had the issue—

you can file a bug report / submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

nightchef wrote:

I haven't changed my software update settings once since I bought the computer, so apparently automatic updates has been on the whole time (I bought it about 16 months ago).

Not necessarily. I was once force-upgraded to Sonoma when I was running Monterey.

Has anyone tried downgrading? How big a PITA was it? (I could restore from a backup, but TBH it's been a bit too long since my last system drive backup, so this wouldn't be ideal.)

I restored my computer to Monterey. It was quite the hassle, I have to say. I had to setup a bootable flash drive to do it. And even after I restored, my files appeared to be corrupted. I wiped the computer again and then set it up as a new installation via iCloud.

That is what I would recommend in your case. You can go all-in on iCloud. Once everything is synced, wipe the computer and restore to the old version. Once you login with iCloud, all your data will be re-populated.

If you have any files in Mail that are in an "On my Mac" mailbox, or even if you have a large amount of Mail, I recommend exporting to MBOX format and then re-importing from that. Only keep the last year or so of e-mail online. Otherwise, it can take some time to download all the mail again.