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Operating Systems IOS Apple

Apple's iOS 16, macOS Ventura and watchOS 9 Public Betas Are Ready To Download (engadget.com) 29

We're a couple of months out from Apple officially rolling out the next major versions of its various operating systems. However, you can try out iOS 16, iPadOS 16, watchOS 9, macOS Ventura and tvOS 16 right now. Apple has released a public beta, a few weeks after it offered up the first developer betas. To access them, you'll need to sign up for the Apple Beta Software Program and follow the directions.
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Apple's iOS 16, macOS Ventura and watchOS 9 Public Betas Are Ready To Download

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  • macOS Ventura? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Monday July 11, 2022 @02:53PM (#62693944) Homepage

    I grew up in the 90's so that is just "When nature calls" for me... Or another version for the toilet. I am not joking, we are using MacOS for development at work and we dread every OS "upgrade", as something additional is locked down every time which breaks our stuff. I mean we hold off upgrading for a while, but at some point Apple pushes you...

    • A friend of mine mentioned something about their new versioning file system for certain types like text. I laughed because VMS was doing that since the 1980s. Everything old is new again.

      • Was a pointless feature then and still one now. If you need proper backups you use a proper source control system, preferably remote. If you just need to keep an old copy then copy to a backup file.

        • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          What an idiotic take. VMS file versioning was neither a "proper backup" nor "proper source code control", it served a different purpose. Just because you're ignorant of it does not mean it was pointless. Is Time Machine a pointless feature? I mean, it's not a proper backup or proper source code control, right?

          • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

            So VMS backed up to a seperate remote disk system that would be unaffected by a head crash or server room disaster did it?

            Try again.

        • definitely wasn't pointless. As a long time openVMS admin supporting an accounting department with many shared files, file versioning was used every day for proper audits without file count creep seen in the windows shops pre-sharepoint etc. A way for users/managers to back out bad work or recover data without administrative overhead when a file was 'saved over the top' of another... because it never happened.

          We transitioned from openVMS to Tru64 and windows systems and the loss of this force a regression

          • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

            "without file count creep"

            The backup files/deltas were there, just hidden. Hardly revolutionary. Its quite easy to hide a file on unix or windows too.

      • I'm f$outta here
      • A friend of mine mentioned something about their new versioning file system for certain types like text. I laughed because VMS was doing that since the 1980s. Everything old is new again.

        Macos has also been doing transparent File Versioning (which they call "Generations") for quite awhile too. Long before APFS was introduced, HFS+ has supported automatic File Versioning and Journaling since OS X 10.7 (Lion), released in 2011; so, 13 years ago at this point. Not quite "since the '80s"; but not exactly "yesterday", either.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      My Nvidia Shield got updated a couple of weeks ago, and now CEC barely works and videos freeze for a few seconds.

      I'm starting to think I won't bother with updates for devices like that once they work well enough. There isn't much of a security threat, it only runs three apps that I trust: Kodi, Smart Tube and iPlayer. The latter two only access one website that is unlikely to be hacked.

      • I have a shield tube. The 9.0 update fucked it hard in the HDCP department. HBO in particular became a problem. The 9.1 update which just came out seems to have remedied this.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      That is why I wait until it is a good time to upgrade like a year or more later. ;)

  • by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Monday July 11, 2022 @03:07PM (#62693992)
    Thanks for the notice. Now I can avoid going to Mac Rumors and various other Mac forums and see all the posts complaining that the betas aren't 100% bug free and production ready.
  • That being the several months after the fall release date.

    • I wind up not bothering somewhere until November or December. I've seen patches happen, then fixes for those, etc.

      I would be real happy if Apple could perhaps go with a tick-tock rotation for OS versions. One version, for an entire year, is just fixing stuff and refactoring the code base. Next year, add stuff. This way all the stuff that is either outdated, broken, or insecure can be looked at and addressed with the pressure to add new features off of them.

      One example is Time Machine. This was a great

      • I wind up not bothering somewhere until November or December. I've seen patches happen, then fixes for those, etc.

        I would be real happy if Apple could perhaps go with a tick-tock rotation for OS versions. One version, for an entire year, is just fixing stuff and refactoring the code base. Next year, add stuff. This way all the stuff that is either outdated, broken, or insecure can be looked at and addressed with the pressure to add new features off of them.

        One example is Time Machine. This was a great utility when it came out in the early 00s... but things have changed. It would be nice if it can be turned into something like Arq backup, and not just offer to back up to network shares, Time Capsules, or local drives... but S3 buckets and other network based shares that have object locking built in as a deterrence for ransomware. Maybe even offer a backup service separate from iCloud Drive which is S3 based and have object locking available, so it becomes easy to set up for average users.

        Another example is APFS. Apple did great with this from its announcement in 2016, to converting all iPhones to it without any horror stories during an iOS patch. However, it would be nice if it had the option for checksumming (like ZFS and btrfs), just because it would be give peace of mind, so you know the data doesn't have bit rot. Or, iSCSI support, because macOS is the only major operating system that does not have this native.

        Time Machine was never intended to be an Enterprise-Level Backup. Full Stop.

        What it does, and does quite well, is provide a drop-dead-simple way to backup a family's Macs. Setup and Maintenance is essentially a non-issue; and no matter its limitations on more complex setups, one has to admit that it provides a "No excuses" ability for anyone with a Mac and a spare USB drive to start backing-up their household Macs in seconds. By the way, you can even hook up additional drives, and Time Machine will automagi

  • I just wanna go back to using Mac OS 9. That was a good OS. Pretty sure Ventura is number 13 right? Correct me if I'm wrong on that. Frankly I no longer notice any big differences in new versions of macOS. The differences might be too hidden for me to notice, I don't know. I really miss the old days of Apple, when they changed things up more often, and actually let you service the computers, even encouraging you to upgrade and improve upon your machine.
    • by mrex ( 25183 )

      I love old school Mac OS, but lets be honest - it was pretty dated under the hood. INITs and CDEVs were straight out of the 80s, Multifinder was always a hack (albeit an epic, Andy-scale one), programs just bodging each others memory space as SOP... eugh.

      The interface was supremely elegant, the UI design manual was pioneering and still some of the best material out there on the topic, and there are still a lot of things we can learn from the elders. But troubleshoot a few extension conflicts to refresh your

      • by _merlin ( 160982 )

        You forgot the number one hack under the hood: M68000 interrupt levels were so deeply ingrained into the OS that interrupts were dispatched through the M68k emulator, right up to the end. The Macintosh was a great machine for 1984, but they were designing a computer for the '80s, not a system to last decades, and it really showed. They painted themselves into a corner in a lot of ways.

        Or do you want to talk about multi-tasking? The main multi-tasking system was cooperative, and only allowed a maximum of

      • I've never had to compile extensions into the kernel with macOS, it wasn't too bad.
      • by martinX ( 672498 )

        Just run Conflict Catcher. Sorted.

      • by martinX ( 672498 )

        The fun part was getting frustrated with all the system extensions so you'd disable them all, marvel at how fast your Mac was, then slowly add them back until you got frustrated with all the system extensions...

    • by martinX ( 672498 )

      I stopped caring after System 7. It was the pinnacle of OS achievement. Just add the Aaron system extension for that futuristic look.

      • I stopped caring after System 7. It was the pinnacle of OS achievement. Just add the Aaron system extension for that futuristic look.

        Maybe after 7.6; but there were no end of ID=10 System Bombs on early PPC Macs until they sorted that out around System 7.6. All sorts of Extension-Version issues during that time, too. I remember thinking that if I wanted DLL Hell, I'd just use Windows instead. My employer at the time bought a Powermac 6600 (IIRC) for the QA Department. It came with System 7.2 or 7.3. Most unstable POS I have ever had the displeasure of Maintaining. It almost drove me to Windows, it was so bad! Finally settled down around

    • I just wanna go back to using Mac OS 9. That was a good OS. Pretty sure Ventura is number 13 right? Correct me if I'm wrong on that. Frankly I no longer notice any big differences in new versions of macOS. The differences might be too hidden for me to notice, I don't know. I really miss the old days of Apple, when they changed things up more often, and actually let you service the computers, even encouraging you to upgrade and improve upon your machine.

      Yes, you can have the Windows paradigm; where "changing things up" every couple of versions is the name of the game. For example, Ask any Windows User how they feel about Control Panel changes from XP through W11 (or frankly, just between W8.0 and W11).

      Instead, Apple prefers to keep UX changes fairly simple, slow-moving, and generally with a way to revert to prior behavior. They do, however, tend to make rather radical changes under the hood.

      One recent example, APFS. A massive change in Filesystem, undertak

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