Ben Reid on June 5, 2014, 3:28 am

How To Try OS X 10.10 Yosemite Beta For Free

OS X 10.10 Yosemite Developer Preview 1 is immediately available to those who have stumped up the $99 annual fee and are enrolled in Apple’s Developer Program. And for those who aren’t, you’re not completely out of luck, as Apple had announced the OS X Beta Seed Program a while back, to give users a chance to test drive pre-release OS X software without being a developer. In this guide, we’ll show you how to sign up for the OS X Beta Seed Program and gear yourself up for OS X Yosemite beta, when it’s available sometime this summer.

The OS X Beta Seed Program was announced back in April, enabling anybody with an Apple ID to try out pre-release OS X software for free. Not only does it serve as an ideal opportunity for non-developers to see what is new, but it also allows Apple to gather a great deal more feedback from the wider audience, which in turn makes for a better and more refined end user release.

As discussed in our previous coverage of the OS X Beta Seed Program, signing up is fairly simple, but for the benefit of those who didn’t catch the first article, here are the steps:

Step 1: Point your browser over to: appleseed.apple.com/sp/betaprogram

Step 2: Scroll down the page, and beneath the image, you’ll see a rather large, blue “Sign up” button. Click it.

Step 3: Next, you’ll need to type in your Apple ID credentials – the same user name and password you’re often prompted for when downloading an app.

Step 4: That’s it! From there, you will be shown a banner – as seen below – stating that an email will be sent to you when the beta is available to download from the Mac App Store, which will be your port of call should any updates to the beta arise in the future.

Please bear in mind that this is unfinished software not yet ready for public consumption. Thus, it’s not going to offer the slick, refined experience to which you will have become accustomed on your Mac, and if you cannot deal with imperfections, you may well want to wait until the final edition of OS X 10.10 Yosemite is rolled out this fall.