OS X Yosemite Beta starts rolling out to the public

My successful signup to the Beta Program

I was very fortunate to signup for Apple's beta program last Wednesday night after being alerted that their latest OS for the Mac is being offered to the public for testing. In the four years that I owned a Mac and upgraded to their OS annually, this is the first time I experienced having the public participate for beta testing. In the past, this was only exclusive to developers who pay yearly to have their status renewed. I immediately grabbed the opportunity and signed up to the program since only the first 1 million users will be able to participate in the testing.

Email confirmation I received today

Welcome to the program

This morning, I received a notification that I got in to test drive OS X Yosemite. I got really excited because I can now take a look at Yosemite. A link is available in the email which redirected me to OS X Yosemite's Beta site. After logging in to the site, there are reminders on installing Yosemite on your Mac. First, your Mac needs to have enough memory (at least 2GB) and disk space (at least 8GB) to run the OS. You also need to have Mavericks installed on your Mac. Second, as a precaution, backup your Mac using Time Machine. You'll never know what could happen after you install Yosemite and its always a good practice to perform a backup. Then finally, you can now download and install Yosemite. You will get a redemption code then download the OS from the Mac App Store.

Since this is a beta software, you don't want to install it on your main machine. In my case, I read some articles on how to partition the hard drive on my Mac and install Yosemite there. This article from Ars Technica is just one of many articles on how to do it on your machine. The OS is a 5GB download and I'll probably just do it this weekend. I'm really looking forward to test the OS and share my findings to Apple.