hoakley November 9, 2017 Macs, Technology

Apple is nudging us to upgrade to flagging High Sierra

The number of users upgrading to High Sierra seems to have fallen below Apple’s expectations, and it has now embarked on a campaign to try to nudge users to install the upgrade.

The first step is a banner advertisement for the High Sierra upgrade in the App Store’s Updates page, which arrived a couple of days ago. I don’t recall Apple ever promoting its products there in the past.

A more silent arrival yesterday was a pushed ‘update’, listed in Installations as macOS Installer Notification, which installed a bundle named OSXNotification.bundle in /Library/Bundles, a newly-created folder for this purpose. This looks set to appear in our notifications each week until we finally succumb and upgrade.

No one seems to have realised that slow uptake in upgrading is the result of High Sierra’s incompleteness, botched launch, and lack of major new features in its present form. Apple would surely be better investing its money and labour in completing High Sierra with full support for APFS on Fusion Drives and rotating hard disks, and better support for writing as well as reading its new image and video formats.

When you can’t give your product away and resort to using a security update mechanism to try persuading users, isn’t it time to ask how to improve that product?

10Comments

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1

anon on November 9, 2017 at 8:51 pm

“I don’t recall Apple ever promoting its products there in the past.”

They’ve done this for every release since at least Yosemite.
https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/hide-os-x-yosemite-update-mac-app-store/
http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/02/hide-os-x-el-capitan-from-mac-app-store/
https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/hide-sierra-upgrade/

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- 2
  
  hoakley on November 9, 2017 at 9:00 pm
  
  Thank you – I clearly don’t remember seeing those.
  Did Apple also send out a silent ‘security’ update notification to those who didn’t upgrade after a month? If so, can you remember what it did, and why none of those reports mentioned it?
  This is odd, as each year I alway keep one Mac back in the previous version of macOS for some months before upgrading it. Yet I cannot remember ever seeing it in the App Store in that way.
  Oh – and the ruse to remove the banner works still. However it doesn’t affect that mystery bundle in /Library/Bundles, which is actually the main issue here. We all tolerate ads, but being delivered unwanted software by a mechanism which we think is for security and urgent system patches is surely different.
  Howard.
  
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- 3
  
  hoakley on November 9, 2017 at 9:03 pm
  
  PS I tolerate anonymous comments with bogus email addresses, but don’t like them. I understand why people don’t want their personal details spread over blogs, but entering a fictitious email address which isn’t even shown is inviting the spam filter to eat your words.
  Howard.
  
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4

Jordan on November 9, 2017 at 9:12 pm

Who wants to risk loosing all their data for a minor update?
I’ll stick with running macOS Sierra on my MacBook Pro with my Fusion drive.
If Apple ever finishes HS, let me know.

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5

Steven Kapplin on November 10, 2017 at 8:05 pm

I’ve searched my entire High Sierra drive but cannot find the bundle you mentioned nor a so-named folder. For it to show up must settings be changed in App Store preferences? I did, however, find it in my Sierra installation. For the folder to appear is a new version of macOS necessary?

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- 6
  
  hoakley on November 10, 2017 at 8:20 pm
  
  What I believe that Apple did was:
  1. Put a banner in the App Store, as I am told they have done in previous years. That is fairly innocuous, and easily turned off anyway.
  2. Used their security and urgent software update ‘push’ system to deliver an installer to all Macs running Sierra, and probably below, but not to those running High Sierra. This installer created a new folder, Bundles, in the main Library folder, and put a bundle in there. I believe that bundle to be quite different from the App Store banner, and from its contents understand it to be a timed notification to users to upgrade, which will fire every week from next week into the New Year.
  I hope that is clearer.
  Howard.
  
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7

Steven Kapplin on November 11, 2017 at 5:38 pm

Yes, quite clear. Thank you.

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8

jdaniel2014 on November 12, 2017 at 9:06 pm

As anon said, Apple has been doing this for a while now. I don’t remember the mechanism Apple used. I never dug into it that much. (But I really appreciate that you are doing that!)

I don’t have this update because I have turned off all updates, including security updates. That is the only way to avoid the daily reminders to update. But even that is more gentle than what Apple does with iOS. There, Apple automatically downloads the update and uses a security dialog to trick users into applying the update. You have to know to go into Settings > Storage > Manage Storage and manually remove the update to be given a week’s reprieve of alerts. As I’m still running iOS 10, I should be safe forever now.

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- 9
  
  hoakley on November 12, 2017 at 9:20 pm
  
  I have been watching Apple’s pushed updates for macOS at least once every day for the last couple of years. This is the first time that I have seen Apple push anything other than a security update (or, previously, urgent macOS patch).
  As I still have all my installation records, I will check through them to see whether anything else has come.
  Howard.
  
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  - 10
    
    hoakley on November 12, 2017 at 9:44 pm
    
    I have just checked. In two years records of installations, this is the first such pushed update which was not a security update.
    Every previous pushed update from Apple has been one of the normal updates to security data files.
    Howard.
    
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