Last month, Apple Inc. made its latest operating system for Mac users available as a free download. Yesterday, the company told The Loop that it was making macOS Sierra available to users as an automatic download. The automatic download will only take place if you have selected to receive new updates automatically in the background, your Mac is compatible with macOS Sierra and you have enough available space on your machine.

The process will only download macOS Sierra in the background and will not install it on your machine. You will be alerted once the download is complete and can choose to install at a convenient time or choose to ignore it completely.

Apple told The Loop that the auto download would take place randomly for Mac users over the next week.  

Enable automatic downloads

If you haven’t already enabled automatic downloads for your Mac you can follow the steps below:

From the menu bar at the top of your computer screen, choose the Apple menu (apple icon) > System Preferences > App Store > under the section Automatically check for updates, select Download newly available updates in the background.

Macs compatible with macOS Sierra

Apple says the automatic download will only take place if you have a Mac that is compatible with macOS Sierra. However, AppleInsider has received reports of the automatic download taking place even on incompatible Macs.

Macs that are compatible with macOS Sierra include:

MacBook from late 2009 and later; MacBook Air from 2010 or later; MacBook Pro from 2010 or later; iMac from late 2009 and later; Mac Mini from 2010 or later; Mac Pro from 2010 or later.

If the automatic download is trying to download macOS Sierra on your Mac that is not compatible then you will need to disable the automatic downloads by following the steps above.

Free up space on your Mac

Apple recommends you need 8.8GB of available storage in order to install the latest OS on your Mac. The automatic download will not happen if it detects that you do not have enough space available on your Mac. It will alert you that there is not enough available space and you will need to free up space before the download will take place.

Tip: To check your available storage, click the Apple > About This Mac > Storage.

If you need to free up some storage for the download you can clean out your Download folder, delete unnecessary files and folders and uninstall apps that you don’t use. You can also compress or delete large files or move them to an external storage device or to your iCloud account. Read our article to learn more about freeing up space on your Mac.

If don’t get around to installing the macOS Sierra download, and continue to fill up space on your Mac, then the installer file will be deleted automatically to free up necessary space.

If you don’t want macOS Sierra automatically downloading to your machine, make sure you have disabled the auto downloads in System Preferences. You will then be alerted when the download is available for your machine and can choose to download it or not. You can follow the steps in our article on how to download and install macOS Sierra.

Image via Apple