By Dan Moren

November 3, 2016 8:28 AM PT

Getting off the macOS beta train—this time, for real

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

As I’m leaving in the next few days for a lengthy trip, I decided it was time to unenroll my MacBook Air from the macOS beta seed. I waited until the official 10.12.1 release dropped, and then followed my own advice to go to System Preferences > App Store and disable beta updates.

Unfortunately, I woke up this morning and found that my MacBook had decided to go ahead and install the 10.12.2 beta overnight anyway. This is pretty crappy, especially because that beta is very definitely a beta (Messages, in particular, seems super buggy).

So what’s the point in having a switch if the switch doesn’t work? Developer Craig Hockenberry pointed me towards a post of his from back in September that explains one potential issue: if your Mac has already found a beta update before you disable beta updates, it may still get installed automatically at some point.

Craig’s post outlines some command-line trickery that you can use to remove a beta update from the App Store. I wish I’d found it a few days ago, since now I’m more or less stuck with 10.12.2 unless I want to spend the time to restore from a backup over the next couple days (Spoiler: I do not.). Here’s hoping nothing else is seriously screwed up.¹

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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