Download MacOS Sonoma Public Beta Now If You’re Interested
Apple has made the public beta of MacOS Sonoma available to any interested Mac user to download and install onto their compatible Mac.
Beta system software is much less stable and less reliable than final versions of system software, so even though the public beta is available to anyone, it’s really best reserved for more advanced users to install onto secondary hardware. It’s not unusual for apps to crash or be incompatible with beta system software, or even the entire system to not behave as expected.
Separately, Apple also released the public betas of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, and watchOS 10.
The MacOS Sonoma public beta is concurrent with the MacOS Sonoma developer beta, so if you already installed the MacOS Sonoma dev beta there is no point to installing the public beta, though you technically can switch beta tracks if you wish to for some reason.
Downloading & Installing MacOS Sonoma Public Beta
If you’d like to get the MacOS Sonoma public beta on your Mac, go to https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram on your Mac, then sign-in with your Apple ID and proceed to enroll in the public beta program.
Once your Apple ID has enrolled in the Sonoma public beta, you can go to Apple menu > System Settings > General > Software Update > Beta Updates > choose “MacOS Sonoma Public Beta”, and you’ll find the MacOS Sonoma public beta available to download in the Software Update system settings area.
Be sure you backup your Mac to Time Machine before installing any beta system software. Failure to backup could result in permanent data loss.
The final version of MacOS Sonoma will be released in the fall as a free update.
I am trying Sonoma on a M1 Mac mini and not finding it particularly interesting. But it also is pretty stable too so there’s that. Much of what is new in Sonoma I am not that interested in.
All of the recent macOS versions seem to be focused more on getting you to buy new hardware (iPad, apple watch, etc.) or pay for subscriptions to apple services (TV, Music) rather than anything useful. I don’t care about having a new, over-saturated wallpaper, or another variety of poop emoji…and I’m not buying another mac for the sole purpose of being able to do that.