Stop macOS 26 nagging with one tiny policy tweak

Averse to "liquid glass"? Are you happy enough with your Mac as it is? Try this local policy and banish those upgrade nag screens for a few months.

Stop Tahoe Update is a tiny script that persuades macOS to stop urging you to upgrade to macOS 26. Rather than any scary low-level hackery, it merely installs an even tinier custom profile that tells macOS a little white lie: your Mac is controlled by an organizational policy forbidding version upgrades.

Apple launched macOS 26 "Tahoe" in June 2025, and its new "liquid glass" design is not universally popular. (The social network formerly known as Twitter still has its moments occasionally, and @juanbuis's tweet remains our favorite commentary on this masterpiece of Apple's human interface design VP Alan Dye – who has now moved to Meta, we are sure by complete coincidence.)

Installation is very simple by Linux standards, although as it's Terminal-based, it might be intimidating for many Mac users. On the other hand, those guys have probably already installed Tahoe, so all this becomes irrelevant. All you do is open Terminal, clone the GitHub repository, make the three short scripts executable, and run the one called install-profile. Then hop over to System Settings and accept the new profile.

There are two other scripts: one reports on the current status and the third uninstalls the policy, freeing up your Mac for the upgrade and all the faux transparency effects you can eat, and more.

Ever since OS X 10.9 in 2013, Apple has used California-themed codenames. Apple also made macOS a free download – which makes it easier to persuade people to accept version upgrades, now an annual event. "Tahoe" switches to the year of release rather than a sequential version number, which also allowed Apple to synchronize the version numbers of its various different OSes.

Not everyone wants to upgrade and not everyone can. Tahoe only supports four models of Intel-based Mac. Apple keeps offering bugfixes and essential updates for superseded OS releases for a year or so – so Sequoia should be a safe bet at least until macOS 27 appears.

The Reg FOSS desk has an entry-level MacBook Air, with just 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage, and doesn't have room for the new OS version. We also don't like the sound of it, so for six months or so, we've been dismissing the upgrade reminders – but in recent weeks Apple is making them more prominent. For us, this handy little tool arrived at an opportune moment.

We installed it, read the surprisingly short install script, and, reassured, ran it. We then found that we had an outstanding update that we'd missed, drowned out by the nags to go to Tahoe. We installed that, did a possibly unnecessary reboot, and blessed silence reigned.

It's a neat little hack, and we know of a few people who tried out Tahoe and disliked it enough to do manual downgrades. We suspect this little tool may prove temporarily quite popular. Its simplicity reminds us of Corbin Davenport's similarly minuscule Just the Browser, which uses a similar method to de-enshittify a bunch of the leading web browsers of all the bloat their suppliers are cramming in – without modifying a single byte of the code.