Should you install these betas?
Selecting from among several beta OS versions in the Settings app on iOS 18.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
We are not highlighting this second round of developer betas because we think you should go out and install them all on the Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches that you use day to day. These are still early versions, and they’re likely to have significant performance, battery, and stability problems relative to the current publicly available versions of the software.
But generally speaking, these second developer builds are the first ones I install on my secondary test devices—a collection of mostly older devices that have been replaced but are still considered current enough to run the new update. The initial builds are usually little more than a tech demo and can have major show-stopping bugs (an M1 iPad Air with the first developer beta on it simply stopped responding to any input, including a hard restart, and I needed to set it aside so its battery could drain all the way before I could do anything else with it), but the second betas tend to be somewhat more amenable to normal everyday use.
The new iOS and iPadOS betas will run on just about any hardware that can currently install and run iOS and iPadOS 18, with a couple of older exceptions. The macOS beta will run on any Apple Silicon Mac and on a handful of Intel Macs released in 2019 and 2020. The other betas will generally run on anything that supports the current versions, with some caveats (Liquid Glass effects only show up on newer Apple TV 4K boxes, for example, while the first-gen Apple TV 4K and the old 1080p Apple TV will run the update but without Liquid Glass).
If you don’t have spare devices you can dedicate to testing, we’d recommend waiting until the public beta in July before you even think about running any of these betas, and only after you’ve backed up all the important data on those devices. Rolling back to an older software version is doable, but a bit of a pain. Alternatively, those with Apple Silicon Macs who want to test the latest versions could try setting up a virtual machine using an app like VirtualBuddy or one of the others that leverages Apple’s built-in Virtualization framework.
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