Dirty unwanted "upgrade" = nuke the disk image and start over.
I have a Mac Pro 5,1 that I've been propping up for years. It's been a great machine and has some serious longevity. You all know this, that's why you're here. Apple just pulled a really dirty trick on me.
I've been running my 5,1 on MacOS 12.7.6. I'm very careful about turning off automatic updates. Last night I got a wild hair to repurpose my machine as my household media server. Everything was going great until... suddenly immediately after a reboot, my wifi would not connect despite having done so effortlessly just a few minutes ago.
So first step, I tried reinstalling my root patches. It starts going through the processes as normal, tells me it's capable of patching, then it errors out with this:
- SystemVersion.plist build version mismatch: found 26.3.1 (25D2128), expected 12.7.6 (21H1320)
An update is in progress on your machine and patching cannot continue until it is cancelled or finished
- Unmounting root volume
- Failed sanity checks, cannot continue with patching!!!
- Please ensure that you do not have any updates pending
So I did the dance, and brought my machine over to where I can plug it into the internet via cable - I get the same thing.
So I try removing the "upgrade" via Terminal and although it seems like it's done something, once I reboot it hasn't. Stuck at the same place.
So I decided to try to do a 'dirty install' of my 12.7.6 over the top of my previous build. And here's where I know that Apple is up to some really dirty tricks - Even though my system is still running 12.7.6 and everything is working except for the root patches, when I try to install on my main disk I get a message that "MacOS cannot be downgraded".
So here's the thing - even though my system is still running 12.7.6 and I have not authorized it to start installing OS26, the system is tricked into thinking that the upgrade process has begun JUST BY DOWNLOADING THE UPDATE IN THE BACKGROUND.
This feels like a slap in the face to us OCLP users. I mean c'mon, we already know we're at EOL why do this nasty little certificate upgrade trick while downloading the OS in the background just to make it difficult for us who are extending the life of our machines. We know we're at the end of the road, why you gotta mess with us?
My only recourse at this point is to format the drive and start completely over.
Enshitification at it's finest.