Foiling Apple Mdm Upgrade to Stay on macOS Sequoia

2026-08-06

My work laptop is Company Managed and, as part of that, the Company™ decides which version the machine wants to upgrade to, which limits the versions shown by softwareupdate and removes the “stay on same major version” option in the Software Updates UI.

% sudo softwareupdate --list
Software Update Tool

Finding available software
Software Update found the following new or updated software:
* Label: Safari26.6SequoiaAuto-26.6
	Title: Safari, Version: 26.6, Size: 225173KiB, Recommended: YES,
* Label: macOS Tahoe 26.5.2-25F84
	Title: macOS Tahoe 26.5.2, Version: 26.5.2, Size: 5797605KiB, Recommended: YES, Action: restart,

But, there will be no macOS Tahoe for this guy, many reason, mostly aesthetic but also have you tried full screen sharing with MS Teams on Tahoe ? Since moving into management I spend a lot of my day in meetings, very often screen sharing and jumping between windows and desktops, I don’t want to deal with the performance issues.

↯
The lowest amount of compliance is the right amount of compliance to start with.

After not too much digging, I found there is a /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist, which seemed like the right target and reading it shows several keys with Managed in the name and 26 in the value, bingo !

% defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate
{
    [...]
    ManagedProductKeys =     (
        "MSU_UPDATE_25F71_patch_26.5_major"
    );
    ManagedProductMarketingVersion = "26.5";
    [...]
}

So, I deleted them with defaults delete.

% sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate ManagedProductKeys  # neeeded
% sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate ManagedProductMarketingVersion  # neeeded

And… Tada ! Sequoia is back and can be installed from the CLI or the UI.

% sudo softwareupdate --list
Software Update Tool

Finding available software
Software Update found the following new or updated software:
* Label: Safari26.6SequoiaAuto-26.6
	Title: Safari, Version: 26.6, Size: 225173KiB, Recommended: YES,
* Label: macOS Sequoia 15.7.8-24G824
	Title: macOS Sequoia 15.7.8, Version: 15.7.8, Size: 854959KiB, Recommended: YES, Action: restart,
* Label: macOS Tahoe 26.6-25G72
	Title: macOS Tahoe 26.6, Version: 26.6, Size: 5889778KiB, Recommended: YES, Action: restart,

% sudo softwareupdate --install "macOS Sequoia 15.7.8-24G824"

There are three additional Managed entries that seem to relate to the annoying “Software Update Available” popups, I’m looking into those next and I’ll either update this post or publish a new one.

% defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate
{
    [...]
    ManagedDoItLaterDeferralCount = 2;
    ManagedDoItLaterUserNotificationTimes = ([...]);
    MaximumManagedDoItLaterDeferralCount = 0;
    [...]
}