Nine days ago I did the thing everyone with any sense tells you not to do, which is install a public beta of a brand new operating system on the actual laptop I actually use for actual work. Apple opened up the OS X Yosemite public beta on July 24th, capped it at a million seats, and I signed up within about twenty minutes of the announcement hitting my feed. No spare partition, no backup Mac sitting in a drawer. Just backed up to Time Machine, crossed my fingers, and hit install.
So here's where things stand after a week and change.
The look of it is the whole story right now, and I have Opinions. Yosemite drops the skeuomorphic stuff Apple's been slowly walking back since iOS 7 landed last year, and goes flat: translucent menu bar, translucent Dock, everything letting the desktop color bleed through behind it. On my Retina MacBook Pro it mostly looks great, genuinely. On my older non-Retina Mac mini hooked up to the TV, the translucency looks muddy and a little sick, like a photo that got compressed one too many times. Same OS, wildly different first impression depending on the hardware under it.
The bigger issue, and the one I keep hearing about from other beta testers, is the new system font. Apple swapped out Lucida Grande for Helvetica Neue across menus and system text, and on non-Retina displays it renders thin to the point of being genuinely hard to read at normal size. I bumped my Dock and menu bar up a notch just to stop squinting at 11am. That's not a beta bug that'll get patched, that's just what the OS looks like now, and I think somebody at Apple owes non-Retina users an apology.
A couple of things worth flagging if you're thinking about jumping in yourself, because Apple buried these in fairly dry release notes and I almost missed them. iCloud Drive is sitting right there in System Preferences looking very tempting to switch on. Don't, not yet, not if you've got an iPhone or iPad still running iOS 7. Turning it on migrates your iCloud Documents and Data over to the new format, and devices on iOS 7 can't read that format at all — your Pages and Keynote files just vanish from those devices until you update to iOS 8 this fall. I didn't read closely enough the first night, flipped it on out of curiosity, and spent a confused ten minutes on my phone wondering where a document I'd been editing that morning went. It comes back once your other devices update. It's just an unpleasant surprise if nobody warns you.
Every beta build also stamps a little watermark in the corner of your desktop, "OS X Yosemite beta," with a build number underneath, in case you forget what you agreed to. I've got 14A298i sitting bottom right of my screen right now, which I mostly notice when I'm trying to take a clean screenshot for something and have to crop it out.
Battery life is down, noticeably, maybe 20 percent worse than I was getting on Mavericks, which lines up with basically every other report I've seen. My fan has also decided it enjoys spinning up for no reason I can identify, usually around when I open Mail, which is a program that should not require active cooling to check for new messages. None of this is unusual for a first beta build nine days out from launch, and I'd bet real money most of it gets fixed before this ships in the fall. I still wouldn't put it on a machine you can't afford to have misbehave for a few weeks.
Spotlight is the one change I have zero complaints about. It's moved to a big centered box in the middle of the screen, closer to what iOS does, and it now pulls in stuff like Wikipedia summaries, nearby locations, and unit conversions right inline instead of just local file matches. I've already caught myself reaching for it instead of opening a browser tab for quick lookups, which is exactly the kind of small habit change that tells you a feature actually works.
The Handoff stuff Apple showed off at WWDC back in June, where you start an email on your phone and finish it on your Mac, isn't really usable yet since it needs iOS 8 on the other end and that's still months out. Feels like the most interesting piece of this whole release and I can't actually try it. Figures.
Anyway. If you're the patient type, wait for the second beta. If you're not, back up properly first, actually properly, not the half-hearted way I did it.