What the hell setting do you have enabled where OS X does that? It doesn't even tell me about updates, I have to go check them manually in the App Store (which segfaults about half the time)
On the contrary, I've completely disabled OS update checks via OS X's settings menu on both my personal (El Capitan) and work (Sierra) computers. I've managed to keep both up to date on security updates while avoiding obnoxious High Sierra update reminders quite easily.
iOS is terrible in this regard, however. I've only managed to keep my phone on iOS 9 through a bug/workaround involving a tvOS beta cert.
Both true and false. The OS is not receiving updates, but Catalina and newer have a built-in malware scanning tool that does continue to receive updates from apple. You can read about that here.
This is not distributed via Software Update, but via Apple's XProtect malware protection system and should be updated silently in the background. You can check /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/XProtect.meta.plist to see if it's up to date. To force an update, run "sudo /usr/libexec/XProtectUpdater" or "sudo launchctl start com.apple.xprotectupdater".
10.12 is Sierra. I cannot see any security update in the updates tab of the App Store app, nor in the list of updates that were installed in the last 30 days.
This is insane, was there additional software installed by your employer that might have conflicted with the updating process?
In my case we have lots of remotely controlled macOS updates that get triggered and supervised by the company I work for.
That was a weird one, but nonetheless, here's the list of security update, and there's been nothing for older versions since October 2021. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222
Also note that 12.5.6 was for a single actively exploited CVE and no other vulnerabilities.
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