Preventing the macOS Catalina upgrade advertisement from appearing in the Software Update preference pane on macOS Mojave

Not yet ready for macOS Catalina in your environment, but you’ve trained your folks to look at the Software Update preference pane to see if there’s available updates? One of the ways Apple is advertising the macOS Catalina upgrade is via the Software Update preference pane in System Preferences:

If you want to prevent that advertising banner from appearing, run the following command with root privileges:

softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"

You should see text appear which looks like this:

Ignored updates:
(
    "macOS Catalina"
)

The advertisement banner from the Software Update preference pane should now be removed.

Downloading macOS Mojave from the Mac App Store

Now that macOS Catalina has been released, it’s become more difficult to access the macOS Mojave installer for those who still need it. Fortunately, Mojave has not been removed from the MAS and it is still available for download. Apple has a KBase article that shows how to access the macOS Mojave page in the Mac App Store, available via the link below:

https://support.apple.com/HT210190

To access the macOS Mojave page directly, please click on the link below:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos-mojave/id1398502828?ls=1&mt=12

That link should open the MAS and take you to the macOS Mojave download page.

The Mojave installer itself will download via the Software Update pane in System Preferences.

In the event that you’re blocked from downloading macOS Mojave, you should be able to download it in a virtual machine. I have a post on how to do this, available via the link below:

https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/downloading-older-os-installers-on-incompatible-hardware-using-vms/