OS 27 Beta experiences

[casperes1996]

I’ve been beta testing various versions of macOS since mountain lion. I’m not sure I’ve had as stable an experience with any beta 1 or beta 2 as I have with golden gate. There’s a handful of visual bugs and a few minor functional ones but much less than prior major versions’ first betas. Now there can be machine variability. Ventura for example was full of kernel panics in my gpu driver on my iMac in its beta period but fine on apple silicon.

Haven’t yet tried iOS 27 outside of simulator. Don’t want to update my phone because of its importance and I know my bank will block access to beta users. And my iPad isn’t supported anymore. Beta has some bugs when building with the 27 SDK in simulator but runs fine when running apps built against 26.

Another year like this with solid refinements and it really could be the fabled snow leopard 2

What do the rest of you think so far?

 

[Cmaier]

I’ve only installed iPadOS 27 so far, and it’s hella stable. The only issue I had with the first beta is when a phone call comes in on my linked iPhone, and it pops up the alert on the iPad to notify me that it’s asking the caller’s name and reason for calling, the ipad gets very slow and everything stutters for 10 minutes.

That may have been resolved in the 2nd beta - haven’t had the situation come up yet.

 

[Roller]

I’ve only installed iPadOS 27 so far, and it’s hella stable. The only issue I had with the first beta is when a phone call comes in on my linked iPhone, and it pops up the alert on the iPad to notify me that it’s asking the caller’s name and reason for calling, the ipad gets very slow and everything stutters for 10 minutes.

That may have been resolved in the 2nd beta - haven’t had the situation come up yet.

I've had a good experience with iPadOS beta 2 as well. It's been extremely smooth for such an early version. I'm still waiting for Siri AI after several days, but that's not really a fault of the beta. I'm much more reluctant to install the betas on my Mac and iPhone, since I rely on them much more than my iPad.

 

[fischersd]

MacOS 27 Beta 2 is putting my secondary display brightness o zero - not every time that the Mac puts them to sleep (which is a little frustrating). It also over-exposes some videos on playback recorded by my iPhone 16 (both with iOS 26 and 27). On beta1 my Mac ran out of application memory once - shut down all apps, it was still having issues with the memory pool - a restart fixed that. Also had some safari crashes on Beta 1
Edit: It seems it's not fussy on which display it targets for the brightness reduction - the third time it's the primary display.

WatchOS 27 has a bug were often you're unable to clear notifications when you first pull down from the top of the screen.

iOS, had the Siri Setup notification that wouldn't clear (that eventually did on its own - so there was a cloud issue). The spotlight indexing took forever (and didn't complete before Beta 2).

TVOS - I've been reporting for multiple versions now that the initial setup doesn't send the shutdown signal when shutting down after the initial install. (both of my TV's - a Samsung and a Sharp).

Also had multiple instances where CarPlay didn't kick off properly (using wireless CarPlay).

Everything reported of course.

Yep, very easy for me to run these on my everyday use devices.

I've been running betas for Apple operating systems since about 2008/2009?

When I was at BlackBerry, I was often on the Alpha's for new handheld devices.....that was just scary. Often the cellular radio code wouldn't be working yet - only wifi - so you just prayed that one of the CxO's didn't send you an email when you weren't in wifi coverage. . (and, yes, it was mandatory to use your primary device for testing when you worked at BB - if you were participating in the program)

 

[Cmaier]

MacOS 27 Beta 2 is putting my secondary display brightness o zero - not every time that the Mac puts them to sleep (which is a little frustrating). It also over-exposes some videos on playback recorded by my iPhone 16 (both with iOS 26 and 27). On beta1 my Mac ran out of application memory once - shut down all apps, it was still having issues with the memory pool - a restart fixed that. Also had some safari crashes on Beta 1

WatchOS 27 has a bug were often you're unable to clear notifications when you first pull down from the top of the screen.

iOS, had the Siri Setup notification that wouldn't clear (that eventually did on its own - so there was a cloud issue). The spotlight indexing took forever (and didn't complete before Beta 2).

TVOS - I've been reporting for multiple versions now that the initial setup doesn't send the shutdown signal when shutting down after the initial install. (both of my TV's - a Samsung and a Sharp).

Also had multiple instances where CarPlay didn't kick off properly (using wireless CarPlay).

Everything reported of course.

Yep, very easy for me to run these on my everyday use devices.

I've been running betas for Apple operating systems since about 2008/2009?

When I was at BlackBerry, I was often on the Alpha's for new handheld devices.....that was just scary. Often the cellular radio code wouldn't be working yet - only wifi - so you just prayed that one of the CxO's didn't send you an email when you weren't in wifi coverage. . (and, yes, it was mandatory to use your primary device for testing when you worked at BB - if you were participating in the program)

Having also been on iphone betas since the beginning, there was one iphoneOS beta that nuked the cellular (including phone call) functionality. That was not fun, since it was back in the days where you actually used the phone to talk to people, and not to ignore spam calls.

 

[fischersd]

WatchOS Beta 2 is now out.

 

[fischersd]

Holy crap, but beta 2 of MacOS is turning into an evil beast! The system is running out of application memory every few hours....oy!!! .

 

[Cmaier]

Holy crap, but beta 2 of MacOS is turning into an evil beast! The system is running out of application memory every few hours....oy!!! .

I had my mac run out of application memory for the first time in forever yesterday. But I am not running the betas. Maybe something in the water.

 

[leman]

I've been using the 27 betas for over two weeks now and it has been stable and performant for me so far. At the same time, I fail to see any noteworthy improvements over Tahoe. Spellchecking is still awful, Spotlight constantly launches apps from the wrong disk and refuses to learn my habits, and Safari's top hit for "gmail" is a random dead firebase link even though I'm opening my work emails dozens times per day.

 

[Jimmyjames]

I've been using the 27 betas for over two weeks now and it has been stable and performant for me so far. At the same time, I fail to see any noteworthy improvements over Tahoe. Spellchecking is still awful, Spotlight constantly launches apps from the wrong disk and refuses to learn my habits, and Safari's top hit for "gmail" is a random dead firebase link even though I'm opening my work emails dozens times per day.

I have Golden Gate and Tahoe on separate volumes and there is definitely some strangeness with Spotlight when two different os are installed. Only fair to say that I have found “describe an extension” in Safari, the “fm” cli tool and Siri AI, really good.

 

[casperes1996]

Holy crap, but beta 2 of MacOS is turning into an evil beast! The system is running out of application memory every few hours....oy!!! .

Huh. I'm on 9 days uptime on B2; Memory consumption is low and well-behaved. All my E-cores are maxed out almost all the time running spotlight and Siri stuff that I sense will never finish and there are bugs; window management has some minor glitches here and there, spotlight/Siri has some glitches - all fairly minor though.

Agreed with Leman that it's no major revolution and there's still a lot of stuff that's been bad for a while that still is, and there definitely are bugs. But I do like GG so far and it's more stable than B1/B2 usually are. Plus GPTK4 with the Metal 4 codepath is great

I'm running Final Fantasy Rebirth 1440p->5K with MetalFX, all highest ultra settings and MetalFX frame interpolation. Usually rendering 45FPS before frame interpolation and thus ~90 after. 5K HDR on the Studio Display XDR; Great look. The HDR in the game is also much better than FFVII Remake. I had to basically turn off HDR in Remake because it was so aggressive - almost everything was full peak brightness.
Anyway, with GG Metal4 GPTK4, the game runs excellent.

 

[Jimmyjames]

I'm running Final Fantasy Rebirth 1440p->5K with MetalFX, all highest ultra settings and MetalFX frame interpolation. Usually rendering 45FPS before frame interpolation and thus ~90 after. 5K HDR on the Studio Display XDR; Great look. The HDR in the game is also much better than FFVII Remake. I had to basically turn off HDR in Remake because it was so aggressive - almost everything was full peak brightness.
Anyway, with GG Metal4 GPTK4, the game runs excellent.

Are you able to comment on the announced improvements to MetalFX upscaling? Is it noticeable and if so how? Is it just the M5 that has improvements?

 

[fischersd]

The out of application memory dialogs are a false positive - but, interestingly, activity monitor is also susceptible to the bug. I was getting them so often, that I suspected they mustn't be real, so now I'm just closing the dialog box every time it appears and noting it in my log.

Sent this screenshot to Apple what Activity Monitor was seeing:

Heh - just got another one now as I'm writing this. There was one waiting for me when I woke the system up at 6am.

 

[casperes1996]

Are you able to comment on the announced improvements to MetalFX upscaling? Is it noticeable and if so how? Is it just the M5 that has improvements?

From what Apple said I interpreted it that all models are upgraded but M5 especially so. I only have M4 and M1 generation hardware. I have not tried side by side testing or even tried the same game on both. All that said my 1440->5K with frame interpolation looks fantastic. I’m not the best at these sorts of image quality comparisons but in my opinion it holds up against the likes of FSR 4.1 and DLSS 4/4.5

The out of application memory dialogs are a false positive - but, interestingly, activity monitor is also susceptible to the bug. I was getting them so often, that I suspected they mustn't be real, so now I'm just closing the dialog box every time it appears and noting it in my log.

Sent this screenshot to Apple what Activity Monitor was seeing:

View attachment 39547

Heh - just got another one now as I'm writing this. There was one waiting for me when I woke the system up at 6am.

Memory crisis really hit hard. 0! Bytes physical memory.

 

[fischersd]

The network stack on the Apple TV has also been taking a hit. Netflix stops playing, then I get an AirPlay message "Unable to play to Living Room".

The Apple TV is wired Ethernet. It'll default to Wifi if the Ethernet goes down. The AirPlay dialog is unclearable - just keeps bouncing back. Doing a "power off" doesn't provide great stability - one of the drawbacks of the standby mode that they use. Luckily the power bar switch is handy - removing the ATV from power for several seconds gets you a clean boot and several hours without the problem recurring.

The living room sound system is Sonos - an Arc with two One satellites.

Maybe the ATV is also thinking that it's eARC connection it bait and trying to AirPlay to the Sonos? . Fun!