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Jacoblee23

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 10, 2011
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I have done the Yosemite and El Captain beta's for the past two years. Is this one worth using on my main daily driver 2015 Macbook Pro W/Retina?
 
Sure as long as you aren't doing anything of critical importance and or you have a backup you can restore to.

Note that if you're a Chrome user it's basically unusably broken right now. I'd check the working apps thread here and see if stuff you use daily is posted about there.
 
So, I found beta version 2 (torrent). It runs like absolute trash for some reason with Safari.. Constant lags in safari and locking up. Safari is borderline unusable for me. I even did all the tricks like deleting plugins and etc. Firefox on the other hand runs insanely fast and faster than ever before. Is my beta 10.12 the latest one? I'm not seeing any software updates so I am guessing that it is. I have no complaints YET other than Safari being so terrible. I have opted in to betas for the past two years and never had major problems like this so I didn't do a backup on el captain either. What to do what to do?
 
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Note that if you're a Chrome user it's basically unusably broken right now...

Working just fine with Chrome here.. What issues are you having ?

To the OP, as others have said, if it's you only computer...I'd wait till beta 3 or 4.
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So, I found beta version 2 (torrent). It runs like absolute trash for some reason with Safari.. Constant lags in safari and locking up. Safari is borderline unusable for me. I even did all the tricks like deleting plugins and etc. Firefox on the other hand runs insanely fast and faster than ever before. Is my beta 10.12 the latest one? I'm not seeing any software updates so I am guessing that it is. I have no complaints YET other than Safari being so terrible. I have opted in to betas for the past two years and never had major problems like this so I didn't do a backup on el captain either. What to do what to do?

Beta version 2 ? There are no updates as of yet. Current build is 16A201w.

Mine's working just fine with Safari and Chrome, without any significant lags or crashes.
 
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Working just fine with Chrome here.. What issues are you having ?

To the OP, as others have said, if it's you only computer...I'd wait till beta 3 or 4.
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Beta version 2 ? There are no updates as of yet. Current build is 16A201w.

Mine's working just fine with Safari and Chrome, without any significant lags or crashes.

My bad. The torrent was listed as beta 2 for some reason so I didn't know.
 
I know many folks here, it already is the daily driver, but the tricky part is, that the while this DP is stable, there's no guarantee the subsequent Developer Preview will be.

I think Apple's track record is fairly solid, and the risk of getting a really buggy beta is low, its still there.

My advice prior to going with macOS 10.12 as your daily driver is to clone your existing drive and keep that as a backup should you find issues and wish to easily rollback.
 
Sure as long as you aren't doing anything of critical importance and or you have a backup you can restore to.

Note that if you're a Chrome user it's basically unusably broken right now. I'd check the working apps thread here and see if stuff you use daily is posted about there.

Just be aware that there's a caveat with that: if you have time machine backups performed in Sierra, you can't restore them into El Capitan or prior. If you need to roll back to El Cap, it will be to the point you last backed up prior to installing Sierra.

Developer previews and Betas are just that. If you're willing to deal with some minor flakiness, go for it. if you have work to do on your box, avoid.

I've run DPs before and have had a few issues I could live with temporarily (in Mavericks, Yosemite). But really, unless there's some new feature you're desperate to try out, just wait.


edit:
One other thing. if you're going to run a Beta or DP, please be sure to report bugs and problems to Apple rather than just whine about them elsewhere. This is why Apple release them, for bug reports...
 
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ust be aware that there's a caveat with that: if you have time machine backups performed in Sierra,
In the past if I install a DP, I make sure to turn off my Drobo Mini drive which holds my TimeMachine backups for that very reason. I also run clone my drive via CCC just to east the restore process should the need arise.

Ideally, running off an external drive would be a superior approach, but only if you have an SSD. I find spinning disks to be too slow on USB to make it a feasible alternative.
 
It is fine for most things. I've been using it as my main OS since it came out. How often do they update dev previews? I know that beta is every 2 weeks, so would this also be the same?
 
Well it runs considerably worse than 10.10.5. But then again, El Capitan wasn't a performance champ either in comparison to Yosemite.
 
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I don't see why many people are having issues with it? I mean it is a beta version, and the first of it. Runs pretty smooth on my 2015 rMBP.
 
I always install betas on secondary machines or at least second partitions.

Unfortunately, Sierra took me from four officially supported Macs to two, both of which are main computers for me. Thanks to Dosdude one of the unsupported ones is now running Sierra, while the other unsupported one isn't until I can swap Airport cards in it.

I'm still using Mavericks as my main OS, and have Sierra in a secondary partition on my primary Macbook Pro. I ran migration assistant and brought in everything from my primary partition so I can and have worked in it.

When I really need to depend on getting work done, though, Mavericks gets restarted.

The slightly annoying bug now is that Mavericks doesn't recognize the Sierra partition as bootable-I have to shut the computer off and use boot manager to boot into Sierra.
 
I have it running solely on one of my MacBooks (15" 2011) and it's very good. I am also experiencing the Chrome issues that were mentioned prior, and I've switched to Safari until they can be fixed. It's got its quirks, that's for sure. I put it on my X99 tower this week and am typing from it now, but Safari's streaming last night's GoT on my 4K display, and it's causing lag on the whole system, plus I had to go enable Flash, etc. I wouldn't use it as a daily driver yet - just for testing purposes. However, I will say, as someone who has used Developer Previews since Mountain Lion DP1, this has to be, by far, the most table DP1 I have ever used.
 
No. Don't do it!

My SOMETHING was itching and I installed it - but I regret it and now I am lazy to restore from Time Machine....

Here's what happens:

Safari has plenty of beachballs.
System boots quite slow - shutting down or rebooting - same story.
Apps launch slow - for example Fantastical 2 usually started within a second now it takes about 10 seconds to start.
Some apps don't work yet.
Safari sometimes cannot be closed without force quitting it.
Siri causes System to not have sounds - need to restart the mac.
Network connection is probably capped and is quite slow.
Interface is sluggish sometimes slow FPS - but in certain situations.
Apple Mouse is sluggish sometimes.


My Config is a mid 2011 27 inch iMac with 20 GB of Ram and 512 Samsung Evo SSD. Sierra takes about 12 GB of Ram after a quick period of time.

Just wait for Public Beta to show up.... for now.... I would say no if you want to fell you have a fluent OS.
I don't recommend for now.
 
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I've had to downgrade back to iOS 9. iOS 10 was crashing too much for me and was quite sluggish on my 6+. I'll wait for the next beta maybe.
Just so you know, these gentlemen are talking about the macOS beta, since we are in the macOS 10.12 category of the forum.

On Topic: I don't think I'll install the public beta when it's released, unless it turns out that it's very stable.
 
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