Apple rolled out the first update for macOS High Sierra Developer beta 2 on Thursday, and released the first public beta, too. The macOS High Sierra public beta is a free download open to anyone with a compatible Mac.
macOS High Sierra was first shown off in early June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. The new version of the Mac operating system replaces the HFS+ disk format with APFS, includes H.265 High Efficiency Video Encoding (HEVC), virtual reality support, better privacy controls for Safari, iMessage storage in iCloud, reduced storage for Mail messages, improved Siri support, and more.
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The beta versions of macOS High Sierra are exactly that: beta. Expect crashes, broken features, incompatible apps, and possibly data loss, too. Don’t run the betas on mission critical Macs, either. That’s something best left for the official release this fall.
With that ominous warning out of the way, it’s pretty easy to get your Mac up and running the public beta. Just back up your Mac, sign up at Apple’s public beta website, and the let the High Sierra install.
Members of Apple’s Developer Program can login to their account to get at the macOS High Sierra beta and iOS 11 beta, too.
Is HomeKit included in High Sierra?
All – *if* you choose to install this the one tricky / non-intuitive thing to watch out for is that there is a screen during the installation process where you actually have to click a check box to have your filesystem converted to APFS. It’s easy to miss if you click continue, continue, continue too fast…
Old UNIX Guy