First PB1, then DP5, now DP6? Wrong way to do it?

[freedevil]

Fanta is the friend. Strong pretend OP.

 

[DSeeker]

They state that bug reports from the DPs get reviewed by engineering while those from the PB get screened by a separate group. One can guess that the latter are just counted up and will never get feedback to the submitter and likely will never be seen by engineering unless they get thousands of identical reports. If you have 1,000,000 public beta testers and each submits just 10 bug reports, how many employees will take how many years to check them all out? (Sounds like a good math problem!)

This is too simplistic a view. Not all developers are created equal (or if they are, some are more equal than others.) Joe Blow who paid his $99 and doesn't have a real product on the market is going to get treated differently than Microsoft. The latter will have liaison directly with the engineering development team at Apple. They don't submit a form, they have their guy walk down the hall and talk to an Apple chief engineer. Joe Blow is likely to have his reports scanned by software running on a computer somewhere in Apple engineering. Between the two there are probably dozens of shades of gray.

A good way of looking at this is to make an analogy to various means of acquiring diamonds. At the top developer tier they are buying diamonds from jewelry stores. At the low developer tiers and the PB they are moving trillions of tons of African gravel to Apple for storage and (perhaps) later sorting through it.

 

[talmy]

Between the two there are probably dozens of shades of gray.

Certainly there is. I wasn't even talking about developers, which have their own access (Bug Reporter for most, direct phone access, I'm sure, for Microsoft!). There are invitation only beta testers (Appleseed Software Customer Seeding) and the public OS X Beta Program. Certain members of the press get beta copies, and I believe theirs comes with computers they must return. Each of these shades has different responsibilities, feedback mechanisms and access to engineering.

Developer Program Pre-release Software
Appleseed Software Customer Seeding
OS X Beta Program
I can't find a reference for the press copies.

 

[afsnyder]

Those default to "off" in Yosemite, but you can turn them on again in System Preferences -> Sound -> Sound Effects.

WOOAHH new sound effect, sweet!

 

[fanta]

Fanta is the friend. Strong pretend OP.