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I would like to find a well-substantiated answer to WHY this is appearing, not simply claims about WHAT it is that appear in this other question's answers. It is really creepy (for someone who owns their own computer and is not using a company-managed computer) to suddenly see that an outside force is managing some aspect of your OS. Coming from Apple, no less, the original anti-Big Brother company of the famous 1984 ad.

I don't want Apple "managing" any part of my computer without my foreknowledge and understanding of what they are doing and why.

Since "why" is somewhat broad, I would accept an explanation that is based on procedure (the exact series of steps that will make it appear and disappear) or purpose (it appears because Apple is doing blah blah blah), but I would prefer both. If you make a claim about purpose it should either have evidence behind it, or should make sense of the weird message in a way that rings truer than any alternative. And the explanation of purpose should include why Apple is taking over management of this aspect of my computer. An explanation of procedure could simply explain what I did that permitted Apple to think they had this right.

I realize of course that an explanation of purpose might include the claim that they're not actually "managing" anything in the sense that a company would (where a company controls administrative decisions the your computers it manages) but such a claim should be backed up.

Software Update window with strange message in its dialog box

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  • Have you ever run a Beta version of macOS on this machine/disk-image?
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Apr 3, 2022 at 1:14
  • Never. I'm absolutely sure I've never run a beta on this laptop, and 99.9% sure I haven't run any betas since Tiger and Panther.
    – iconoclast
    Commented Apr 5, 2022 at 16:55
  • OK. One troubleshooting tip I found somewhere indicates this can happen when the device has had a beta version of macOS installed.
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Apr 6, 2022 at 1:15
  • I am experiencing this for the first time now on macOS Sonoma 14.4.1. I never had a beta version installed, ever. I think it's a bug because when I click "Learn more" the prompt comes up for a second, disappears, then the "managed by" notice is gone. Commented Apr 8 at 17:11
  • You're reading too much into the word "managed". Apple hosts various catalogues of software updates that are available to a given user; this also includes the criteria for availability, e.g. whether a particular update is shown to you on your hardware. So to that extent, Apple is 'managing' which updates you can see.
    – benwiggy
    Commented Jun 2 at 10:26

1 Answer 1

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After some searching on the internet, I found the apple guide for enterprise management where the url is listed swscan.apple.com as the MacOS updates server.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101555

Use Apple products on enterprise networks

Learn which hosts and ports are required to use your Apple products on enterprise networks.

So, the URL itself seems safe enough, however, why it is being displayed for some users only, could be a weird bug.

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