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Comment by egb | Hacker News Reader

I so wish Apple had not removed the older Sierra installer from the Mac AppStore... I need to update some machines but High Sierra does not seem ready for reliable use yet.

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If you still have a copy of "Install macOS Sierra.app" on any of your Macs, you can simply copy that or make a bootable installer from it:

  sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app

If you can't locate a copy of Sierra, please let me know and I'll mail you a USB installer.

I know it's not helpful at all to your current situation, but this vicious cycle with proprietary OSes was one of the most beneficial thing we got when switching my dev shop to Linux. You can install a release from the late 90s if you really want to (not recommend tho lol). Nobody can ever take it away.

I just wish they had made APFS optional for SSDs (as it is if you install to spinning media). It seems like 99% of the problems I'm seeing reported for High Sierra are due to the filesystem (or apps using a brittle, hand-rolled method of disk access).

That would just delay the problems getting fixed though. IIRC you can pass the installer a flag to skip APFS conversion.

I don't understand why Apple can't just make the past few releases of OS X available to anyone who needs it. It's a free OS now, and it has tons of hardware checks to prevent it from being run on non-Apple hardware.

I don't understand their need to remove/hide the OS upgrades. I have to repair a friend's older MBP next week, and now I need to jump through hoops to get a legitimate installer.

If you fall more than 1 version of OS X behind and they remove the previous upgrade, you're screwed from upgrading to the latest version.

WHY, Apple?

They do; if you have it in your purchase history on your iCloud account and your machine supports the older version you can grab the installer.

If you've downloaded Sierra on another Mac before, you can still find the Sierra installer in the Mac App Store in the "Purchases" tab.

If you don't have it in your purchases list, you can just ask a friend who has it to download Sierra for you from the Mac App Store.

Then you can just copy the Installer app on a thumb drive and run it on your Mac.

Only problem might be that maybe you can't download Sierra from a machine running High Sierra...

UPDATE: I'm wrong, see comment below.

They stopped doing that with Sierra:

"macOS Sierra or later doesn't appear in the Purchased tab. Instead, use the Search field in the upper-right corner to find and open the App Store page for the current version of macOS."

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201272

Note, however, that if[1], and apparently only if[2], you’ve downloaded Sierra from the App Store in the past, you can install

https://github.com/mas-cli/mas

and then use the command

    mas install 1127487414

to download the latest Sierra installer from the App Store.

[1] It worked for me.

[2] Or so I’ve heard.

Thanks a bunch! I downloaded and stashed a copy of Sierra when it first came out, but I recently bought a new Mac that came with Sierra (likely a point release and 10.12.0 likely won't install). I can restore from a netboot, but like having something I can put onto a USB drive.

You've missed the step of looking in the hidden purchases tab. If Sierra was downloaded previously, it is going to be there. There won't be a need to get copies of the software from elsewhere.

In App Store go to Store -> View My Account -> Hidden Items/Manage.

If you haven't updated yet, why would you need the Sierra installer? Nobody managing multiple machines would use a 1.0 anyway.

Depending on how old the OSX currently running is, some features (especially integration into other Apple devices, like unlock with watch or seamless switching to AirPods) are unavailable, but would be available in Sierra.

I think he needs to update something even older.

Correct - snow leopard to sierra would be the goal.

10.6.8 seemed to be the most stable for me.

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