OS X Yosemite public beta launches tomorrow →

Jason Snell:

On Thursday, fall will come early for hundreds of thousands of Mac users when Apple releases its first public beta of OS X Yosemite. The public-beta program, announced during Apple’s annual developer conference in June, lets regular users download and test pre-release versions of OS X. Apple says the first million users to sign up at the OS X Beta Program website will be able to test Yosemite before the OS is released to the general public in the fall.

Users can sign up over on Apple’s website.

This marks the first public beta of OS X since Kodiak way back in 2000. In that public beta, OS X’s Aqua interfaces receieved a fair amount of work. I’m really curious to see how much Yosemite will be influenced by having a million people (plus an untold number of registered Mac developers) running it for months prior to its official release this fall.

Even if the public beta doesn’t influence the final OS all that much, Dan Moren is right: this is a new chapter in Apple history. The OS X Public Beta was a necessity to help developers and users better prepare for the transition from OS 9 to OS X. A big shift like that is clearly not the case here; this is Apple being more open than ever. I like it.