If you have a useless Mac lying around, today is your lucky day. Apple is releasing the first public beta of macOS Sierra later today — it’s probably going to be available at some point over the next couple of hours. This first public beta is likely based on the second developer beta that was released a couple of days ago.
But the main difference is that you don’t have to pay the annual $99 fee to access this public beta. Head over to beta.apple.com to find out how you can enroll in the public beta program. Once you’ve signed up, open up the Mac App Store and download the beta.
But first, let’s take a minute to make sure that you really want to do this. This is a beta of an operating system. Things will fail, stuff will crash. If you’re using your Mac every day, you shouldn’t install the public beta on this device. Instead, you should wait for the final release of macOS Sierra this fall.
If you still want to do it, backup your Mac right before installing the beta. It could get ugly during the installation process, and the last thing you want is a data loss. And be careful with the new iCloud features. Maybe iCloud will fail and make your files disappear.
Finally, it can take a while to download the beta. So why don’t you head over to our early look of macOS Sierra. Siri is the big new feature, but there are other nifty improvements across the operating system.