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I can bet you OSX Lion would have been a lot less buggy if they would have had a public beta.

People always say that, and then people always install the developer builds of OS X "to do so", but then never send the crash info to Apple and just complain on message boards like MR. :rolleyes: And you all saw what happened with iOS 5 and people complaining on the App Store about it during development.

The problem with public betas is that people don't understand it's a beta. You hand them out, and people will completely wipe off their hard drive and use it like it was a retail copy. Just like people are doing with the Windows 8 release preview, and just like a lot of people did with Mountain Lion.

The average consumer will also complain to the public about something before they even consult Apple or Microsoft, and that isn't good when you've given people the ability to speak up and they're not sending feedback correctly.

What would REALLY need to happen is that when Apple and Microsoft send out these consumer/development previews, they need to stop people from installing third-party applications because if you're having a problem using Photoshop in ML, it's a problem for Adobe, and if you're having a browsing issue in Chrome, it's a problem for Google, and NOT Apple.
 
Bit of advice, download a system preference pane called "Secrets" and use it to disable all the flashy visual effects in the system. Makes an old Mac a whole lot snappier.
 
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