Should you upgrade to MacOS and iOS public betas? (no)

For the last few years, I have tested out the latest Mac and iOS developer beta versions, and I've had a lot of mixed experiences. Sometimes it's been rocky and I regretted doing it, other times, it hasn't been that bad and I enjoyed new features I've wanted to use months before they arrived for everyone else.

The public betas of both MacOS 17 and iOS 27 were released this week to the general public, and they coincide with the third release of developer betas. The first few developer betas I've used were pretty buggy. But now that I'm on the third version I can definitely say this year is weird and slightly unstable and you probably want to skip them until September when the final versions come out (hopefully they fix all the bugs I'm seeing now).

MacOS 27

Apple tells you to only load a beta computer OS on an "extra" non load-bearing computer like a spare laptop or something. For the past decade, I did just that, using my travel laptop to test out beta developer versions, but a couple years ago I said YOLO and just installed things on my main desktop Mac I use daily.

For this year's Golden Gate MacOS, it's been a mistake.

• Running Xcode is a pain and I have to use a weird hack to deploy any of the Mac and iOS apps I've made in the last month.
• Apple Photos for some reason expanded the 3Tb of photos I have in the cloud to occupy almost my entire 500Gb hard drive on my Mac Studio, and for the first time since I've owned this Mac, I was getting low storage warnings and I'd have to delete things before I could even download OS updates.
• Being so low on space meant iCloud automatically started offloading almost all my files, including things I used just days ago that were sitting in my safari downloads directory. So lots of my recent work is "gone" but somehow in the cloud but also I get the error like the screenshot above whenever I try to download anything from iCloud. Not ideal.
• Dropbox basically doesn't work and made a temp file that was almost 100Gb, which also filled up my hard drive. Fun.

Bottom line: I really wish I didn't upgrade my desktop, especially since new features on the MacOS side are generally pretty minor and I don't really even see anything new or any upside to taking a risk on my main machine, which feels slightly borked now.

iOS 27

The first couple betas of iOS 27 were pretty rough. My battery would barely last half a day on a iPhone Pro 17 Max. Now on the third version, it lasts most of a day, but in previous years, the battery efficiency didn't ramp up to feeling normal until the last developer betas in late Summer.

Pros

• The new OpenAI powered Siri is actually much better than the Siri of the past 10 years. I usually avoid Siri because I don't want to memorize very specific phrases that would fail if you got even one word wrong. Now, you can invoke Siri while driving and ask complex questions like "Tell me the current score of the England-Argentina FIFA game" and it will say Argentina is ahead 2 to 1 in the 90th minute and if you follow up with "when is the next game?" it will remember context and tell you the date and time of the upcoming FIFA final. In the past, it would just say I can't do that and you need to stop the car and unlock your phone and look that information up yourself.
• Being able to adjust the Liquid Glass look to be more opaque is nice and the whole phone feels easier to use.
• The phone launches apps a little faster, which is good.

Cons

• They tweaked how your phone jumps from WiFi to cell network connections, but I find it annoying because I have a dead spot in my house where WiFi goes down to about 25% strength, and now it changes over to my 1 bar of LTE coverage there which is much slower than even the reduced WiFi of a 600Mbps fiber connection.

• I have so many apps I usually invoke search to launch them, but whenever I do like the screenshot above, various app icons are randomly broken, as about 1 in 3 show up as blank black rounded squares. Swiping down to search for an app is now like opening a kitchen pantry where half the labels are gone from all canned goods. You grab one and think is this creamed corn or apple pie filling?
• Overcast, my podcast app of choice, completely dies in CarPlay any time you select any episode to play.

• My door lock used to unlock whenever I'd wave my phone over the deadbolt, but now it seems NFC features are gone in iOS 27 because I have to use my lock's own app to manually unlock my door now (it worked perfectly in iOS 26 with just an Apple Pay style tap of the lock)
• HomeKit has been a little buggy. Beta versions of AppleTV crash regularly, so various switches and lights in my house are sometimes unavailable in the Apple Home app when they were pretty solid before.

• For a few days, there was a random Matter device showing up as a WiFi point within range of my phone. I think it was one of my AppleTVs running the newest beta. It eventually went away.
• Apple Photos did the exact same thing as my desktop Mac and filled up all of my phone's free space with my old photos from the cloud, which caused my phone to offload almost all my apps, meaning whenever I want to do anything on my phone, I usually have to reinstall an app and re-login to a service to use an app.

Bottom line: Having a way better Siri suddenly makes it useful to me, but I still don't use Siri a ton in my day to day so I would strongly suggest most people wait until later public betas if you can't wait all the way to September when the final version comes out.

AppleTV

• After years of flawless support for my Sonos home theater system, for the first couple developer beta versions, my main AppleTV couldn't see the speakers and when I added them as a new remote speaker system, there was a half-second sync delay when starting any video, making on screen interviews horrible to watch. Eventually on the latest version, my Sonos system seems to work well again as the default.
• The first few betas were buggy to the point the AppleTV would crash and reboot in the night, and I'd wake up to messages saying my main Home Hub was down, then it would be back 10 minutes later, several times a day.

Conclusion

Maybe it's like the Star Trek films where the even ones are good and the odd numbered sequels are not as good, but last years set of betas were not nearly as buggy and I enjoyed using new features before the final versions came out. This year, I'd tell friends to sit this one out, there are so many unexpected weird things going on with my desktop and my phone and my AppleTVs that it's just not worth the risk at the moment.