I've been a Mac-only user for about 15 years now, and I'm teetering on the edge of abandoning the platform. A lot of technically-minded people I know are considering the same. The hardware is outdated, underperforming, and overpriced - and what's worse is Macs are now completely user-unservicable. So I'm weary when I read about an OS update nowadays (it used to be I was excited), because OS X has been getting slower and more tedious to work with for a long time now.

Metal: it's good that Metal exists, even though Apple has no ambitions to introduce performant or even recent graphics adapters into its PC products. Some people may even have wished for Metal adoption beyond Apple, but that's not happening. What's conspicuously missing from Sierra is Vulkan support, so gaming on the Mac is basically a prohibitively walled garden that can only be tackled economically by the big graphics engines (which have mostly ignored the platform) and pre-existing iOS developers.

Swift 3 and Apple Pay: this should not be an OS feature, or at least one that is featured as spots #2 and #3 on the bullet point list.

Picture in picture: in a better world, this would be a window management feature, but OS X is reducing its windowing capabilities in anticipation of a full merge with iOS, it seems. So this is going to be a specialized video component feature instead. Even on the screenshot they chose to show this off with, it's clear this is drastically worse than just lining up non-fullscreen windows side-by-side.

I am using the public macOS and iOS betas. They are buggy.

Do not enroll in the macOS beta if you have your user account login linked to iCloud, as there have been documented problems with this. My wife still can't get in to her account on our Mac; I'm hoping they fix this in Public Beta 3.

All things considered, it probably wasn't worth enrolling in the betas. I don't want to risk messing up my devices by stepping back to production versions, so I'll just ride these out and get off the beta profile when the final versions are released in the fall.

Hopefully the public betas get more stable as we approach release time.

GPGTools (MailGPG etc) and rustc / cargo stable are broken with macOS Sierra.

Moreover there seem to be a few memory leaks. Finder eats up more and more RAM until it requires a force-relaunch. Unfortunately the same seems to be true for the kernel, which therefore requires a sporadic reboot. I also encountered the calendar notification service using 100% of the CPU a few times.

I'd wait for a later beta release or the final version.

Looks like Safari is getting some much needed updates with extensions and the upcoming community engagement. Apple Pay in Safari will allow Apple to add another device type to its payment ecosystem. Overall Safari is getting stronger and is moving in the right direction to keep pace.

Meh. A bunch of silly gimmicks. Meanwhile, drag & drop still randomly breaks in Finder, using certain USB 3.0 devices on my mid 2012 MBP causes reproducible kernel panics and Mail.app occasionally crashes while downloading emails.

Maybe have some of the gimmick crew look at all those crash reports I keep sending instead?

Since there's no context, the news today is Beta 4.

The betas have been on a roughly 2 week release cycle.

This seems pretty underwhelming. Swift isn't even a platform feature. Metal is mostly useless for portable application developers, who probably wish it were Vulkan; and furthermore it may indicate that the quality of the OpenGL stack will degrade over time. Given how little time is actually spent entering payment details, I do it maybe once a month, I also don't see the point in Apple Pay on OS X except perhaps for completeness.

The deeper platform features, especially the new filesystem, are exciting primarily because they're replacing vastly outdated predecessors.

Anyone using the betas?

I'm thinking about installing the iOS 10 beta to my main phone but couldn't find any decent info on its stability for a daily driver. macOS is more dangerous anyway so I'd only get into iOS beta.

I prefer as little interaction with Apple's data centers as possible, but that is the opposite of the direction MacOS is headed. A quick review of increasing number of web services I pay for each month makes for depressing reading and I see the handwriting on the wall... soon I'll be paying apple to view my files.

Looks like go(lang-1.6.3) is broken again in this beta, worked nice in beta 3.

Are there APIs for Apple Pay and PIP that would let Firefox integrate those features if they desire, or are those APIs locked down for Apple only?

Interesting to see the other side. I've always used the iOS betas and they've always had the usual expected bugs before say the last pre-release version, but with iOS 10, for the very first time I've found it to be really very usable. It does destroy your battery life like all betas - but it'll have so much debugging turned on and it is... well... beta! But yeah I'm loving iOS 10 (dev) beta as are my coworkers so much that we've put it on our personal phones and are really happy with everything but the battery life and the odd springboard crash every few days or so.

For me, the iOS betas have been fine since the first developer beta. I usually skip the OSX betas because they require use of the latest XCode which will not let me submit updates to the app store until closer to release.

My general guideline for prerelease OSes is: don't install them on anything you need to actually work. If you have a spare device and want to mess around then go for it, but putting it on your primary phone is complete madness.

Have been using the iOS and MacOS betas since day one without a problem as my day to day devices. There are certainly bugs and crashes here and there but no deal breakers. However, I wouldn't recommend it for most anyone, since when things do break I can easily find work arounds, where the average person may not, and if compatibility for something you rely on breaks then you are out of luck if you don't have extra mac laptops or phones to work on. These betas are far more reliable than previous years. To note, you have a typo in your title. "macOS" is a thing, "MacOS" is not.

I've been using iOS 10 beta since Public Beta 1. Like others have said: mostly stable, with terrible battery life.

One thing particularly annoying for me is HTTP Proxy: it seems that as of Public Beta 2 setting it will cause the device flood the server with many requests. I'm using GlimmerBlocker and on the server side it'd get 1k+ threads almost instantly after I turned on the proxy setting on the iOS side.

Other annoying bug is WebKit View would lose width setting randomly in 3rd party apps (e.g., Reeder).

Don't do it. I had to revert back as it rendered the phone useless. It has so many bugs, that even simple things were not working properly (for instance if you have a group of applications and you want to open one, the first action that happens when you tap on the icon will change the mode to editing [when the icons are dancing and you can move/deleted them]).

I would wait for a while.

I've been running Sierra, iOS 10, and watchOS 3 since the first beta. Battery life on iOS sucks if you use any apps that make heavy use of GPS, but it's not OMG UNUSABLE bad. Just annoying.

watchOS 3 is fantastic, like beta 1 was better than the release version of watchOS 2.

Don't install the beta. iOS 9 beta literally bricked iCloud backups on my iCloud account. I had to get Apple Engineering to wipe everything. Even deleting backups wouldn't fix it, it had to be cleaned up in the backend. Yuck.

The latest beta ironed out a lot of interface bugs I was having, and the battery life is a bit better. But don't expect iOS9 battery life, because comparably it's atrocious. Par for beta course.

Running both, iOS 10 beta has been pretty stable mostly, much better than previous iOS betas, and Mac OS Sierra beta too. They're good enough for daily use but obviously not for any critical stuff.

I use it as a daily and it's fine. Occasional freezes (a few day a day) and very occasional crashes (once a week or so). 6s+.