Right on time for Thanksgiving day, µTorrent – client of choice for many BitTorrent users – has released a Mac version in beta, after a rudimentary alpha release was leaked a couple of months ago (on a BitTorrent tracker, at that).

The lightweight µTorrent client for Windows was first publicly released in September 2005, and was acquired by BitTorrent in 2006, who continued development on the application and promised to release a Mac version. It has now arrived, but as Torrentfreak points out, the Mac release only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs at the moment and may still contain serious bugs.

UPDATE Nicholas here, CG’s resident pirate. Yeah, this beta, while neat and everything, isn’t usable on private BitTorrent trackers yet like What.cd and HDBits. So unless you’re one of those people who think BitTorrent = The Pirate Bay this release is fairly limited. Given the pedigree of the µTorrent name, however, private sites are likely to approve its use within a reasonable amount of time. (Unlike Transmission, the Mac’s traditional lightweight BitTorrent client, which has a history of misreporting stats and being generally unreliable; it’s garbage, so instead use Vuze even though it requires a terabyte of RAM to work properly.) I’ll let y’all know when I start seeing µTorrent for Mac usable on “real” BiTorrent sites. Thank you, and may God bless America.

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