The OS Betas Deep Dive (MacSparky Labs)

In this Early Access Deep Dive for June, we went spelunking into the various Apple Betas and discovered a few things.… This is a post for MacSparky Labs Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?

Private Relay Data Slow-Down

I had an interesting issue with my Monterey Mac. Since I bought my fancy new EERO routers, I’ve been dripping in Internet. But suddenly the party was over. My connection was noticeably slow and laggy. After a bit of troubleshooting, I discovered Private Relay is the culprit.

Here’s my speed with Private Relay turned on.

Here’s my speed just minutes later on the same machine with Private Relay turned off. From 55 to 890! (Interestingly, upload got slower.)

I’m submitting a bug to Apple, and I’m sure they’re already onto this. Monterey hasn’t shipped yet and I expect when it does, it will not crush your Internet speed. But in the meantime, if you are thinking about running the public beta, you’ve been warned.

The Case for the iOS 14 Public Beta

Apple has now released the public beta for the new iOS 14, iPad OS, and macOS Big Sur. This is where everybody who writes about this stuff tells you how you should not install the betas. I am feeling contrary this year.

I have been running the beta on my iPhone and iPad since it was initially released, and I have had very few problems. The battery life is a little worse, but my apps all seem to work, and I’ve had no restarts or crashes. Everything seems to be working fine. I talked about this on the Mac Power Users recently. In my opinion, this year is more about the paint job than the engine. Granted, it is quite an extraordinary paint job, but it’s still paint. As a result, this beta feels pretty stable. I also suspect it is because they released it later in the year. Usually, WWDC happens in the first week of June, and this year didn’t happen until much later.

I have had a lot of fun trying these new beta widgets, and iOS 13 already looks old to me. Don’t blame me if you install it and your iPhone catches on fire, but a lot of us are stuck at home and having something new and shiny on our phones may be just the distraction we need.