GoKawiilIf there’s one thing which is usually a very bad idea even for the most enthusiastic of Apple fans, it’s installing a first developer beta on any of your daily driver devices.
However, since my iPhone is the only iOS device I own recent enough to give access to the new Siri, and I’m extremely curious to try it, I made an exception in this case …
Indeed, while I wasn’t brave enough to install macOS 27 on my primary Mac, I have installed it on my MacBook Air.
I’m not completely crazy: I did wait long enough to allow those braver than I to determine that my devices were unlikely to explode, and that the betas were compatible with certain key apps. But still … I’ve never done this before and will likely never do it again.
On my iPhone, I’m still on the waitlist for the new Siri, so haven’t been able to test that functionality yet. I do have access to some of the other key new features like the AI photo editing capabilities, however. More on that topic later in the week.
On my MBA, I used this bypass to get local access to the new Siri, although it doesn’t have any impact on your position in the waitlist – and the local features are of rather limited use as cloud access is required for all of the features I’m keen to try out.
What has struck me about both betas is their remarkable stability. I haven’t yet encountered a single app that either crashes or significantly misbehaves, and the number of bugs I’ve discovered to date are both few in number and entirely innocuous. I’ve found way more significant bugs in far later dot versions of previous developer betas.
I’m absolutely not advocating that anyone else should follow my example – it remains a bad idea as a matter of principle – but I do think it tells a story.
Specifically, it suggests that Apple has been using iOS 27 for a far more extended period of time within the company than is typical before the first developer release. That gels with the idea that the company genuinely believed it would be ready for release not long after the launch of the iPhone 16.
Apple was accused at the time of advertising vaporware, but it now looks much more likely that it did have working versions of the features it advertised, but decided they were too buggy to be released on the planned schedule. Of course, if it was too buggy to be released even as a developer beta, then the company should never have advertised the features, but it does put rather a different complexion on the situation. This was over-optimism, not deception.
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