My personal opinion is that despite some embarrassing mistakes, macOS 26 is a decent upgrade on balance. I also think a few very vocal commenters are giving a misleading impression about the level of opposition to the liquid glass update.
However, if you decide not to upgrade, you’ll be happy to know that you can stop your Mac from nagging you to upgrade…
Block the macOS 26 upgrade prompt
Frustrated by requests for upgrades he didn’t want, Rob Griffiths found a way to block the prompts.
I personally don’t like the look of liquid glass, and I don’t like some of the functional changes Apple made with macOS Tahoe. So it’s nice to see things like this great notification (above) on a regular basis. Or so I did until I found a way to block it.
He searched on Google and found the same rejecters. A way to stop the nagging is to use a configuration profile to postpone the upgrade prompt.
Mr. Griffiths felt that the procedure needed some expansion and provided his own guide. John Gruber also weighed in on the best way to ensure you get the macOS 15 dot update prompt. Rob’s instructions require you to change this.
forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates enforcedSoftwareUpdateMinorOSDeferredInstallDelay 30
enforcedSoftwareUpdateNonOSDeferredInstallDelay 30 To this:
forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates You can only block for 90 days at a time, which is certainly a big improvement.
Downgrading from macOS 26
If you’ve already upgraded and regret it, you can downgrade back to macOS 15. Arstechnica’s Andrew Cunningham says that Apple provides its own guide because the steps are not very easy to follow.
The easiest way is to create an installer on a USB drive. Anything 32 GB or larger will work. Cunningham recommends naming it My Volume so you don’t have to change the terminal command to your own drive letter.
It’s worth reading the various notes in the detailed guide, but unfortunately there is no downgrade option for machines with M5 chips. For now, this is just the base model M5 MacBook Pro, but of course it also includes the more powerful model that launches this week.
Image: 9to5Mac/Apple/Codioful
