Apple Seeds Sixth OS X 10.10.4 Yosemite Beta to Developers and Public Beta Testers

Monday June 15, 2015 3:04 pm PDT by Juli Clover

os_x_yosemite_round_icon Apple today seeded the sixth beta of OS X 10.10.4 to developers and public beta testers, approximately one week after releasing the fifth OS X 10.10.4 beta and nearly two months after releasing the first OS X 10.10.4 beta. OS X 10.10.4 has been in testing since mid-April, following the early April release of OS X 10.10.3, which included the new Photos for OS X app.

The new beta, build 14E36b, can downloaded through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store or through the Mac Developer Center.

OS X 10.10.3 brought several consumer-facing changes including the new Photos for OS X app, a redesigned emoji picker, and diversified emoji, but OS X 10.10.4 appears to be an under-the-hood update that brings performance enhancements and bug fixes.

Thus far, OS X 10.10.4 betas have not included outward facing design changes or feature additions, but the fourth beta introduced a significant behind-the-scenes update that may improve networking performance for users who have experienced issues with OS X Yosemite.

Discoveryd, a somewhat problematic networking process that has been linked to multiple bugs in OS X 10.10, was removed in favor of the older bug-free mDNSresponder.

It is not clear when Apple plans to release OS X 10.10.4 to the public, but the fact that we've now received six betas suggests we may be nearing the end of the beta testing period. It's possible we could see the public release of OS X 10.10.4 on June 30, the same day Apple plans to release iOS 8.4 with the new Music app and Apple Music service.

Related Forum: OS X Yosemite

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Top Rated Comments

AZhappyjack

149 months ago

So.. We get yet another Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 BETA just one week after the last one, but still no iOS 9 BETA2 to fix the battery drain? :(

iOS beta releases have not come more frequently than about 2 week intervals, historically. OS X dev previews have pretty much followed suit in terms of release schedule, at least for the .0 releases.

Your patience will be rewarded.

This chart is iOS beta releases, and is included for reference:

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

MikhailT

149 months ago

How many more betas are there gonna be of 10.10.4? Damn. It's been in testing for 2 months!

As many as it takes to get the quality of the update to be as bug-less as possible, especially as this may the last update to Yosemite before they shift to El Cap completely. Complex software like an OS update takes months to test, validate, and finish.

The whole reason Yosemite was buggy as heck was because they didn't take their time to do it right.

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

TMRJIJ

149 months ago

OS X Yosemite? What is this nonsense? El Capitan is where it's at. I barely remember Yosemite. What version was that . . OS X 10.3? I'm pretty this came before Tiger right? hmmm . . . . .

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

sniffies

149 months ago

Yosemite is history.

Give us El Capitan beta 2, Apple Music, and Apple News.

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

mw360

149 months ago

3 - Insane battery drain. I was getting 20+ hours under iOS 8 two weeks ago. Now I'm getting 4-6 hours with iOS 9 beta 1. This is easily the highest priority bug to fix - it impacts me every day and renders my iPhone for the later part of the day. This isn't a small problem that requires a bit of tweaking - this seems like a massive issue that needs to be fixed immediately. It may be a small issue code wise... maybe just a busy loop somewhere wasting power in the background... but it has a huge impact on user experience

Nothing is a massive issue in beta 1. Even if the OS crashed every 30 seconds beta testers aren't supposed to go around getting their knickers in a twist about it. You would submit a bug report, and advise you are unable to test further and wait for beta 2. You don't demand a beta 2 'immediately.'

If your user experience is being impacted every day then you shouldn't have installed a developers' beta 1 OS on your phone. If this were a release candidate, you might have a point, but there are months ahead where the beta process will take its usual course. You may find the battery drain is actually a very low priority bug right now, depending on how much Apple know about the causes, and how much work would be involved to fix it.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)