If you’re both brave of heart and hankering to play with the first public betas of Apple’s upcoming operating systems, your dreams have come true.
Apple has just released the first public betas of OS X El Capitan and iOS 9.
The iOS 9 beta build will allow early adopters to try out upcoming features, including new apps like News and a refreshed Notes, transit directions in Apple Maps, an improved Siri, a smarter search which lets you surface results from inside apps, and much more.
On the Mac end, El Capitan offers a variety of improvements to core features like Mission Control, Spotlight, native apps, including Safari, Mail, Maps, Photos, plus performance improvements, and other items.
Until now, the betas of the operating systems have been available only to the developer community. Users will just need to sign up for Apple’s beta program to get in.
Keep in mind that these are still early betas, wherein they’re just stable enough that Apple is comfortable with the idea of just about anyone tinkering with it.
As with any beta software, users should weigh the benefits of having early access to the new features with their tolerance for dealing with software bugs and other issues that could come up. And before installing the upgrade, it’s smart to back up your devices first.
The iOS 9 beta comes ahead of the general release of the mobile OS, which will arrive later this fall. It also arrives a day after Apple made the third version of iOS 9 available to developers.
This isn’t the first time Apple has released iOS as a public beta — that came back in March, with iOS 8.3. It is, however, the first major public beta release; the first that comes with a lot of new features, as opposed to smaller things, like bug fixes and new emoji.
Users who try the public betas of either El Capitan or iOS 9 will be able to upgrade to the final versions when they hit later this fall.
As always, please let us know what you make of the betas as you tinker with them and we’ll have additional details as they become available.
Via TechCrunch and Apple’s beta program