Apple opens OS X betas to everyone


The OS X Beta Seed Program gives users the opportunity to run pre-release software. Test-drive beta software and provide quality and usability feedback that will help make OS X even better.

Join the OS X Beta Seed Program and accept the Beta Seed and Confidentiality Agreement. Apple will provide a Beta Access Utility for your Mac, which gives you access to pre-release versions of OS X in the Mac App Store Updates panel.

Basically anyone could do this, but they had to pay $99 a year to get access to the developer builds. So, now everyone can play around with the latest versions of OS X, apparently. It will be interesting to see if they extend this to OS X 10.10 and also if iOS will be opened up.

One big issue I can see is there will be a lot of added pressure on developers to fix issues which may not even be their problems. Also, it seems obvious, but beta a OS shouldn't be installed on a production machine that needs to be reliable.