Betas in the Air July 10, 2015

Well, it’s that time of year again. The weather in the northern hemisphere is getting hotter, the kids are running around the neighborhood out of school, and Apple is releasing OS betas. On July 9th, Apple released the first public beta of Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan).

Of course, this is a big concern for us. Every year, despite our warnings, we get some users who install the latest (usually not so greatest) Apple OS betas. And, approximately 37 minutes later, report problems on the forums, sometimes in a bit of a panic.

We understand the desire to check out all the new cool features. But really - if you want your Indigo system to be reliable, resist the urge! If you have to, install it on a different Mac or at least a different partition so you can reboot back to your stable Indigo install.

We will test and do what we have to do fix any incompatibilities, but not until much closer to the actual release. This is because we can’t afford the time to try to work around bugs that might get fixed by Apple. A great example is the recurring iOS beta bug around authentication - every iOS beta release that we can recall has broken authentication. Most (but not iOS 8) have those bugs fixed by the release date. Working against a moving target is not an efficient use of our very constrained resources.

We aren’t the only ones recommending that users stick with non-beta releases. For those of you using Airfoil, Rogue Amoeba is saying the same thing. We very much agree with their conclusion: "For now, we recommend users stick with their current version of Mac OS X."

As always, we appreciate your business and support.

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