Apple Seeds Fourth Beta of macOS Monterey 12.4 to Developers [Update: Public Beta Available]

What's fixed with this release?

Nothing as usual.

So here's my own "does it fix" list:

* Apple Music: Internal "failed to prepare to play" error (API level) -> track silently skipped, next one plays
* Apple Music: Track slight stutter at start of any and all lossless playbacks, most noticeable with rhythmic track intros
* Apple Music: After a while of working, gets into a state where it completely fails to sync playlist changes at all and never works again until you sign out of every single device everywhere then sign back in one by one, after which it works for a while until it subsequently, once again, breaks (iOS works fine, Cider works fine and astonishingly even iTunes works fine when loaded via Retroactive on the very same x86 machine where Music is sitting there, failing to sync anything)
* Apple Music: Very slow playback startup with lossless, sometimes just goes with lossy for no reason
* Apple Music: Super janky and inconsistent "back" button behaviour, when it's even visible
* Apple Music: Catalyst apps can't play any Apple Music content whatsoever; it's simply broken, acknowledged by Apple engineering several months ago but apparently making basic music playback work is a super hard challenge for today's l33t super-well-paid engineering staff or something?!
* Safari: Tab group changes completely fail to sync, see playlists above
* Safari: Attempting to e.g. rename a tab group involves fighting it constantly dropping input focus until eventually it settles long enough for you to type something (which may or may not get sync'd)
* Safari: Adding/deleting tabs within a tab group can cause a "dead" tab that can't be closed and doesn't change no matter what you try to visit
* Safari: Make enough changes in tab groups and the browser will outright crash
* Safari: Things in a tab group are trapped forever and you have to manually pull them out if you want to remove the tab group but keep the tabs (deleting a tab group will replace every window on every device that has that tab group with a tabs from an apparently-arbitrarily-chosen other tab group, but in a kinda-broken state where they don't quite sync properly and, of course, what you wanted it to do was just delete the group, but leave your Safari windows and their tabs open - just not in a named group anymore)
* Safari: M1 only AFAICS, gets into a state where external link opens don't work - the browser gains focus but no new page or tab opens; requires actual reboot, not just a Safari quit/restart to resolve; fortunately, very rare
* iCloud drive: Can fail to sync, as above, anyone at Apple notice a pattern here?!
* macOS: Since round about Monterey, a rewritten trackpad driver appears to have a very large number of race conditions which can introduce super-annoying misbehaviour such as: You're dragging something. You used to be able to reliably use a two-finger scroll gesture at the same time as the drag. Now that sometimes works or sometimes, bizarrely, your scroll gesture makes the mouse pointer move instead...

...you get the idea. These are faults I've experienced consistently personally on a wide variety of machines, of a wide age span and across Intel and x86, both brand new purchased with Monterey from the start back to machines upgraded over several years of macOS releases. There are Reddit threads for just about all of them, so please don't add "works for me" comments - good for you; it doesn't work for a lot of other people.

As another poster herein observes, nothing ever seems to get fixed; we just see the bugs get worse and more numerous. When a new bug gets into your workflow, your heart sinks and your stress levels peak, because you know that this is it forever; it's never going to get sorted. So I can answer my own question: No. The new beta and its subsequent general release will fix none of those.

Hope they fix the "external drive not ejected" problem when you sleep the iMac.

What's fixed with this release?

An eye in smiling emoji

Nothing as usual.

Obviously you missed now much Safari caching has improved.

Back in March I posted these results
M1 24" iMac latest beta Safari 15.4 - 285, Firefox 97.0.2 - 229
M1 Max MBP latest beta Safari 15.4 - 295, Firefox 97.0.2 - 229
Both on ethernet, 12.3 beta 5.

With Beta 3 and now Beta 4 of MacOS 12.4 betas I'm seeing substantially faster scores with speedometer 2.0

Browser tests for this Safari Version 15.5 (17613.2.7.1.6)
Speedometer 2.0
M1 24" IMac = 342
M1 Max MBP = 350

Firefox 100 = 242/240 on both examples, still a bit faster.

Quite a speed improvement!

If your not testing this beta 4 against your list, whats the point?

Bug reports are submitted, but there's no response to any of them and no request to retry on a beta. As a beta tester, you will of course be familiar with the developer feedback mechanisms and that Apple engineering do specifically ask if something should be retried on a specific Developer Preview, beta or general public release. I'm not being paid by Apple and my time is valuable, so unless they explicitly ask me to re-test, why on earth would I? They've got the bug, they can act upon that if they wish.

The Developer Preview and (to a lesser extent) beta processes are meant to be about trying new things out (if you really want to) mostly to see if it breaks your own applications. That said, "trying new things out" is increasingly difficult as Apple's documentation is so sparse; did it really take hundreds of macOS engineers a full week to fix one single bug in StoreKit, which is the one and only change described in the Beta 4 release notes? What else changed? If nothing, what on earth did everyone spend all week doing?

Anyway, it's not free testing for Apple and, even if it were, it'd be about finding and letting them know about new bugs. You surely aren't suggesting that end-users should regression test existing bugs in Apple's own software for them...?