Apple Opens Public Betas for iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and tvOS 14

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2020/07/09/apple-opens-public-betas-for-ios-14-ipados-14-macos-11-big-sur-and-tvos-14/

Apple has opened public betas of its next-generation operating system, but remember that these aren’t for daily use. Only install on hardware that you can dedicate to testing.

I’m not seeing a Public Beta of macOS 11 Big Sur yet and other coverage I’ve read isn’t mentioning it. Probably just delayed a day or so.

You’re right, thanks! We missed the Coming Soon badge and were fooled by the fact that you can currently download the macOS Public Beta Access Utility, which installs the profile. However, when you do that, you only get beta 4 of macOS 10.15.6 Catalina.

I’ve fixed the article. With any luck, Apple will get the Big Sur and watchOS 7 betas out shortly.

I hope somebody checks migration of Mail data directly from Mojave to Big Sur this time, and ensures mail does not get lost then or afterwards. I’ve never skipped an entire release (Catalina) before in the history of Macintosh.

As with any major upgrade, it is a very good idea to make a full backup first, so you can recover/revert if something fails catastrophically.

1 Like

A good idea to make a backup of your email before a major OS upgrade. I having been using Mail Steward for decades (my archive goes back to 1990s!) - it turns Apple Mail messages into a MySQL database that can be read independently of the OS.