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Apple today seeded build 13D55 of OS X 10.9.3 to developers, just over a week after releasing the eighth OS X beta, build 13D45a, and nearly two months after the first 10.9.3 beta.
The beta is available through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store as well as through the Mac Dev Center.
Apple continues to ask developers to focus on Graphics Drivers, Audio, Mail, Contacts and Calendar sync over USB in iTunes, and Safari. As was discovered with the first beta, 10.9.3 adds new support for 4K displays, offering “Retina” resolutions that improve readability along with support for 60Hz output from the Retina MacBook Pro.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)655MB. Just kidding - I have no clue how big it is - but I miss those meaningless size of the download posts.
Downloading now. Just kidding - I'm not downloading it right now - but I miss those meaningless downloading now posts.
I've already explained why public beta testers can't see it yet.
No, but you could get off your soap box...You should read previous posts in this thread.
Do I have to start quoting myself?
I've already explained why public beta testers can't see it yet.
You should read previous posts in this thread.
Do I have to start quoting myself?
I assume that, given the tone of this post, you must work for Apple? You must have some reason to expect everybody to just accept your word as the end-all-be-all.
There is a good reason for the delay in releasing it to public beta testers (or for that matter not releasing it at all to them).
Lets say the build is a disaster and ruins your mac. Developers are probably better at fixing it than the general public. So it makes sense to give it to them first - just in case it is a disaster.
Nonsense
Apple has way too many $billions in their pocket to being crowd-sourcing (and without any sort of monetary reward, to boot) beta-testing of an operating system. Hire more people, Apple. Apple could literally afford to have two thousand guys in a huge auditorium doing nothing but beta-testing OS X all day. They wouldn't reguire a huge salary, either. I'm sure a number of computer geeks out there would be willing to do that for $10/hour. It would come with the prestige of being an Apple employee ;)
Companies don't (or at least shouldn't) do public betas to cut costs, they do them to improve the quality of their software. Public betas might not even be cheaper than hiring people directly to do the testing: the company has to go through more support requests, more bug reports, more bandwidth used to distribute the betas, etc.
What makes public betas so useful, is that it brings more environments, users, use cases, and combinations of hardware and software to the testing, than you could ever arrange in a controlled testing environment. For example, the with more beta testers the issues with WD SmartWare (https://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/26/western-digital-releases-new-hard-drive-software-after-mavericks-data-loss/) might have been spotted well before Mavericks was released. It's much easier to recognize patterns, if you have more bug reports to work with.