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Should I do the public beta of Yosemite

C

CoriG

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 7, 2011
626
199
I am sorry for being late to the party, but I just got back from vacation and to my laptop and I was curious whether I should install the public version of Yosemite. I figured now that people have had a week + to play with it.. do you recommend installing it or should I just wait until Fall?

I really appreciate all advice!
 
CoriG said:
I am sorry for being late to the party, but I just got back from vacation and to my laptop and I was curious whether I should install the public version of Yosemite. I figured now that people have had a week + to play with it.. do you recommend installing it or should I just wait until Fall?

I really appreciate all advice!
Click to expand...

I installed as a daily driver and have had 0 issues on my imac. I would say go ahead. As long as there are no 3rd party apps that you rely on to so your job!
 
Had a lot of issues right off the bat on my test platform. It also doesn't look all that wonderful on my non-Retina display either.

However, I recognize that not everyone is having issues (I wish those folks would recognize the opposite, but oh well).

If you want to de-risk it, you can create a new partition and do a fresh install to the new partition, that way you can boot to either the Mavericks side or the Yosemite side as you need to.

I'm assuming you got an invite and/or invites are still available?
 
Thank you!
I did get an invite ... but have not done it yet.

What do you mean create a partition?
 
CoriG said:
I am sorry for being late to the party, but I just got back from vacation and to my laptop and I was curious whether I should install the public version of Yosemite. I figured now that people have had a week + to play with it.. do you recommend installing it or should I just wait until Fall?

I really appreciate all advice!
Click to expand...

I bit the bullet and have been running it for a week or so without major hassles...

There's a bug in Yosemite (at least I think it's Yosemite's fault, judging from log files) that makes SuperDuper! quit because it thinks it's using too much CPU, when it isn't.

I'd check the thread on broken apps beforehand, since there might be something important you use everyday that may not work on Yosemite Public Beta..
 
I installed onto an external drive. Been using it exclusively for a week and it has been very solid.
 
I've been using it on my new laptop with very little issues. With that said, the point of a beta is to use it, expect issues, and report them as they come up. If you're not ready to be a part of that solution, there's really no point for you to run the beta. (*I have reported a couple of issues already.)

The point of the beta is not to run it and hope nothing bad happens - that really doesn't help anyone down the road.
 
CoriG said:
I am sorry for being late to the party, but I just got back from vacation and to my laptop and I was curious whether I should install the public version of Yosemite. I figured now that people have had a week + to play with it.. do you recommend installing it or should I just wait until Fall?

I really appreciate all advice!
Click to expand...

I am running it on a non-production Macbook Pro. Stable enough for me not to need to revert back to Mavericks. But as a beta, it does have a number of bugs. That's why we have the feedback application as part of the beta.

Most (but not all) of the bugs that I have found are related to iTunes which I use heavily. I have found the beta of iTunes 12 to be really buggy. Nowhere near ready for prime time.

Other bugs with mail, calendar, FaceTime.... are easy enough to work around.

One of the most limiting factors for me is that I don't have access to any of my cloud documents.

Here's the deal. If you turn on iCloud Drive then any machine running Mavericks or ios7 won't have access to any documents that you create and store on iCloud Drive. Only other machines running the Beta and with iCloud Drive enabled, will have access.

If you don't enable iCloud Drive, then there is no access to your iCloud documents via Yosemite Beta. So, on my Macbook Pro, I have no access to any of my iCloud documents. Not a bug, just an incompatibility due to the new architecture of iCloud Drive.
 
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I've had some slight bugs with it but nothing too bad.

A warning though- If you rely on iWork for documents and use iCloud, it will not work unless you sign up for iCloud drive, which at that point, won't sync to your iOS devices unless your running iOS 8 on your iPhone and/or iPad.

Documents and Data is non existent on Yosemite for iWork.

Though there is a work around by using iCloud.com.
 
CoriG said:
I am sorry for being late to the party, but I just got back from vacation and to my laptop and I was curious whether I should install the public version of Yosemite. I figured now that people have had a week + to play with it.. do you recommend installing it or should I just wait until Fall?

I really appreciate all advice!
Click to expand...

I have Yosemite installed on my late 2011 MBP and it works fine. I found few bugs but they aren't preventing me from using my computer.

I suggest you to make backups of all of your files first. And then install Yosemite and check if the 3rd party software you need are compatible and works fine on Yosemite and Yosemite itself works fine on your computer. Anyway, make sure that you keep your backups safe and up to date. I manually backup my important files as I cannot trust TM or any other backup softwares since they might be beta too and runs on a beta OS.
 
To beta or not to beta

that is the question. To anyone that then asks, "What do you mean create a partition?" my immediate response would be to NOT install beta software as your personal ability to recover from the negative experiences betas can provide is admittedly limited.

Beta software can run the gambit from no problems to a completely unusable system. One problem with betas is you never know what mix of hardware and software on any given system will provide critical mass that will cause that system to go nuclear. I've got Yosemite beta 5 running on a 2012 Mac Pro on a 1 TB external disk and have had no problems. However, that's a test system, and if it should go bump in the night I can re-boot to Mavericks, flush and format the external HDD, and start over. Would I put Yosemite on my laptop and use it in a critical environment? No, even given the stability I have seen.
 
Just do it. Don't even bother with partitioning, it's more hassle than it's worth. Just back up your stuff.
 
I would tend to side on the air of caution but yeah go for it, My install went like this:

CCC of 10.9.4 onto another spare empty drive
boot to that drive to confirm everything ok
run a disk drive check on drive intending on installing 10.10
then install 10.10 onto said drive

i have had no worries swapping between 10.10 or 10.9.4, no nvidia web drivers for 10.10 yet as expected but everything running ok really, iTunes doesn't work in 10.9.4 properly anymore as i upgraded my library in 10.10 (i know there is a hack for this but I'm not worried)

I'm using 10.10 PB1 daily and its 'OK' but thats not to say that others art having problems, its a risk but with a bootable clone of your drive you have some fall back.
 
I too installed on an external disk (actually, just a SanDisk Extreme 64GB USB 3.0 stick) and I've had no issues using it (no spinning beach balls or lags) with my 2013 MBA 13" (8GB RAM). I've reported a few issues with Mail, Maps and a few other minor things but overall, pretty stable in my usage.
 
Just do it with caution :)

How I did it (Public Beta):
- Backup with Time Machine
- Clean install of Mavericks (My 'other' storage went nuts so non-Yosemite unit)
- Backup back
- Make a partition
- Install Yosemite on partition
- Launch Yosemite
- Download a few essential apps (uTorrent, VLC, Telegram and iPhoto in my case)
- Have fun

It works amazing for me, it's actually better than Mavericks. Sure some bugs, but I report it and that makes me feel useful. I'm really happy that I can help Apple as a regular consumer, make the product even better. But I've thought about it for two months, did my research and found this forum. Since the day I installed Yosemite I've been reading every post, keeping up to date so I know what to look out for and how to fix things.

But the biggest thing you see is that the beta experience is different for everyone. So be prepared for any situation you think is applicable for you. :)
 
PB2 must be around the corner.
DP6 will be PB2, and DP8 will be PB3, and then a month after it's getting released. This is my prediction.

DP5 has been released 2 weeks after PB1, and Safari crashes upon start here. DP4 made Safari crash every now and then.

Just wait one more week and install PB2 instead.
 
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