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Apple Seeds Fourth Beta of macOS High Sierra to Public Beta Testers

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Apple today seeded the fourth public beta of an upcoming macOS High Sierra update to public beta testers, two weeks after releasing the third public beta. The fourth public beta of macOS High Sierra is likely identical to the fifth developer beta, which was provided to developers earlier this week.

Beta testers who have signed up for Apple's beta testing program are able to download the fourth macOS High Sierra beta through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store after the proper profile has been installed.

macos-hs-beta-800x500.jpg

Those who want to be a part of Apple's beta testing program can sign up to participate through the beta testing website, which gives users access to iOS, macOS, and tvOS betas. For instructions on how to install the public beta, check out our how to, and make sure to make a backup before giving the software a try. Don't install the beta on a main machine, because betas are notoriously unstable.

The macOS High Sierra update is designed to improve and refine the existing macOS Sierra operating system. Along with a new, more efficient file system (APFS) designed for modern storage, the update introduces Metal 2, the next-generation version of Apple's Metal graphics API with support for machine learning, external GPUs, and VR content creation.


High Efficiency Video Encoding (HEVC aka H.265) is coming in High Sierra, and many existing apps are being updated. Photos features a new persistent side view and editing tools for Curves, Selective Color, and Live Photos, for example, while Siri gains a more natural voice and support for more music-related commands.

Safari offers a new autoplay blocking feature for videos and Intelligent Tracking Prevention to protect your privacy, and Mail storage is being optimized to take up 35 percent less space. iMessages can now be stored in iCloud, plus there are new iCloud Drive file sharing options and new iCloud storage family plans.

For a full overview of the new features you can expect to see when macOS High Sierra is released in the fall, make sure to check out our macOS High Sierra roundup.

Article Link: Apple Seeds Fourth Beta of macOS High Sierra to Public Beta Testers
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/08/apple-seeds-macos-high-sierra-to-public-beta-4/
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I gave up on this Beta unfortunately. My MacBook (mid 2015 Retina Pro) basically got bricked by the 3rd beta. My MacBook refused to download or run anything, Box/Dropbox/Cloud sync service applications stopped working, and I wound up calling Apple. They couldn't even get my MacBook to properly screen share so I could show them anything. Tried restoring from Time Machine Backups and when it formatted my Hard Drive it formatted it into 4 strange partitions instead of 1 Mac OS journaled. Took me about a week to get everything back up. :(
 
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Aw and I just got the MBP I'm running this on nicely dual-booting with Ubuntu. Will this break it? ... We shall see. (Typing while downloading.)

(NB: You can't resize the APFS container on the system drive...)
 
Someone please patch Apple and Oracle to fix the Java problem, Java GUI Apps don't show the menu bar!
 
Alexander Becker said:
I gave up on this Beta unfortunately. My MacBook (mid 2015 Retina Pro) basically got borked by the 3rd beta. My MacBook refused to download or run anything, Box/Dropbox/Cloud sync service applications stopped working, and I wound up calling Apple. They couldn't even get my MacBook to properly screen share so I could show them anything. Tried restoring from Time Machine Backups and when it formatted my Hard Drive it formatted it into 4 strange partitions instead of 1 Mac OS journaled. Took me about a week to get everything back up. :(
Click to expand...


Bold: Fixed that for you.;)

(It wasn't bricked)
 
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Alexander Becker said:
Fair enough :p But was still a bummer and rendered my MacBook pretty close to useless.
Click to expand...


I had my fair of problems installing the first beta.
One of my Macs is a 2012 MBP 13", installed fine without any hickups, no problem with APFS.
The other one is also a 2012 Machine, a Mac Mini, hardware is more or less the same as the MPB but the install didn't go well, took me a few days to get it back working and have the new 10.13 + APFS installed.
I still have problems updating the Mini, the MBP fairs well.
This was the first time ever that I needed to 'reinstall' OS X/macOS (since OS X 10.0b), I always installed a new OS over the existing one (Install in place), eventually I succeeded to install over the existing OS on the Mini as well.
All is OK except for some Update hiccups on the Mini, yesterdays Dev. beta took several attempts on the Mini.
 
My Mac was setup clean with macOS Sierra few weeks ago. I installed PB3 immediately after.

Updating to PB4 is a disaster, with fatal black screen of death with about 5% remaining. Rebooted and it seemingly recovered and finished updating.

I rebooted into single user mode to run fsck, which didn't find any issue.

Rebooted again and it tries to resume update, with "Completing Installation: About 2 minutes remaining." The update is seemingly complete 2 minutes later, but every subsequent update triggers this "completing installation" process.
 
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Yeah, Alex, I am on the fence about scrapping this beta all together. This is my 4th OS beta and by far the worst. I'm rocking a 2015 MB Pro Retina i7 professor. Itunes hasn't worked in weeks (refuses to load) computer crashes when the lid is shut longer than 15 minutes, and Dropbox was f-ed until the last release. I know it's a beta and I'm all backed up to go to Sierra, but my experience has been significantly worse this time around. I'm guessing due to AFS.
 
StrangeNoises said:
Aw and I just got the MBP I'm running this on nicely dual-booting with Ubuntu. Will this break it? ... We shall see. (Typing while downloading.)

(NB: You can't resize the APFS container on the system drive...)
Click to expand...

(Upgrade went smoothly, but had to repeat refind-install from the recovery disk to get back into linux.)
 
Even through feature wise and cosmetically it seems like the most solid betas ever, under the hood it's in a pretty bad state. HEVC video acceleration is appalling in software and irksome in hardware, not all machines are APFS enabled yet, sometimes the OS doesn't install, sometimes it crumbles and dies, some apps crash with an eGPU connected.

They have about 6-8 weeks until release and will probably have big updates very soon after. Reminds me of El Capitan.
 
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Does anyone have an issue when accessing the APPLICATIONS folder? Whether it be by right clicking an app on the dock or accessing it from the Finder's sidebar, my computer always restarts in High Sierra.
 
Did they remove the possibility of having the drive converted to APFS after installation?

I restarted in recovery mode but I could not find the option in Disk Utility...

[I am using FileVault2 at the moment]
 
Kaibelf said:
17A330h
Click to expand...
Huh!? You sure? Was wondering why I didn't see the update. Installed High Sierra this morning, like 9 hours before the news broke because I knew the update to b4 would come in the evening (7pm in Germany)... but I was already on it.
 
Was just thinking of installing High Sierra on my 2011 MBP and getting a bit excited but after reading the comments it seems like a 4th beta isn't yet reliable enough. :(
 
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flowsy said:
Huh!? You sure? Was wondering why I didn't see the update. Installed High Sierra this morning, like 9 hours before the news broke because I knew the update to b4 would come in the evening (7pm in Germany)... but I was already on it.
Click to expand...

Well, I just upgraded from PB3 to PB4, and it was 17A315 (can't remember the trailing letter) before and is now 17A330h
[doublepost=1502223302][/doublepost]
writevli said:
Does anyone have an issue when accessing the APPLICATIONS folder? Whether it be by right clicking an app on the dock or accessing it from the Finder's sidebar, my computer always restarts in High Sierra.
Click to expand...

I don't have any issues getting into the Applications folder.

2016 MBP, SSD, APFS, PB4.
 
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