I’ve not been very happy with Apple this week. Not only are they mistreating developers, but they’re also mistreating their customers.

If you have chosen not to upgrade to Sierra for some reason, but your mac is both compatible and has enough disk space for the Sierra download, Apple’s servers may download the entire 5GB Sierra installer to your machine without asking you for permission first.

If you have data caps, or are on a plan that offers differential pricing depending on time of use, this could totally ruin your month.

If you want to ensure that Sierra does not silently download to your mac, you’ll need to uncheck the ‘Download newly available updates in the background’ option in App Store’s Preferences pane in System Preferences (see image above).

Who knew by ‘updates’ that Apple were going to include upgrades of 5GB when they ticked that box? Well, now you do!

Unfortunately, your decision not to upgrade to Sierra won’t stop Apple infecting your machine with it’s own little adware notification, and you’re likely to see this at some point or another:

Note that there is no option to say “Don’t remind me again”, so there’s no telling how often you’ll be irritated with this unwanted pop-up.

Hmm, whatever happened to old-fashioned good manners, aye Apple? 😉