Apple Releases Third iOS 18.6 and macOS Sequoia 15.6 Public Betas

I’ve been running the 18.6 developer beta 3 on my 15PM for 24 hours. The public beta released today is likely the same build.

In my experience, 18.6 betas 2 and 3 have been great. They run cool, OS performance is smooth and fast, battery life is as good as I’ve had any on previous version of iOS. All my CarPlay apps work as expected. No issues with connectivity. 18.6 seems to fix some minor but annoying issues that I and many others reported about iOS 18.5.

Standard disclaimer applies: YMMV.

Understandably, the iOS 26 betas are getting all the attention.

But most people, me included, won’t be ready to jump on it until August or even the public release in September. And some folks will just live with 18 for a while.

So I’m happy that Apple is working to make 18.x as smooth and bug free as possible.

I would correct that to "US users". The world is bigger than the American Apple Fanbase.

Nothing to do with US users

Us: (capital U, lowercase s): used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself and one or more other people as the object of a verb or preposition.

i'll say this every time i can in the hopes someone at apple will take the hint, since direct suggestions seem to go nowhere ---- what will it take to get a system wide full graphic EQ (no dumb presets) that remembers each bluetooth device? so simple, so reasonable, requires close to no development hours, so very useful for so many users, yet so unobtainable from apple in too many generations of IOS.

In my experience, 18.6 betas 2 and 3 have been great. They run cool, OS performance is smooth and fast, battery life is as good as I’ve had any on previous version of iOS.

You convinced me to first time install a beta on my 15 Pro. 18.5 has been worst I've experienced for battery life for this phone.

I would correct that to "US users". The world is bigger than the American Apple Fanbase.

I think that "Us nerds" (or "We nerds" if you prefer) is perfectly apt, and I don't at all think that U. S. users/nerds are the only nerds that enjoy playing with the latest toys; I would argue that a tendency towards experimentation and exploring new ideas is pretty universal to all societies and dates back to many generations before the iPhone existed. Certainly the U. S. has produced our share of innovative minds over the years, from the likes of Thomas Edison all the way to Steve Jobs -- but internationally, you could also name plenty of other like minded "nerds": Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Sandford Fleming, Galileo and Marie Curie, just to name a few. Each explored the very edges of what was known about their world, during their lifetime.

And while the term "nerds" may not have existed during the lives of many of these figures, I think the sentiment is still quite apt... and had they lived in our era, I believe any one of them would have jumped at the opportunity to experiment with the earliest developer beta release of iOS.