Apple has just announced the availability of the Public Beta for macOS Big Sur. This new version of macOS does away with a lot of the old and familiar design tropes associated with OS X and leans more heavily on touchscreen-style interfaces – a nod to the slow convergence of macOS and iOS.
You can grab the public beta on Apple’s site although it might not work on some older Macs.
I’ve tried out previous beta versions, and they’ve worked surprisingly well. So if you’re really excited to get into the next step of the macOS and iOS slow merge now you should, probably, be ok.
However, as always, this is a Beta. It won’t be as stable as the final version of Big Sur and you could lose data, or just a lot of time, installing it. Always install betas with caution, and be sure to back up your computer before you install anything as significant as a beta of the entire operating system.
If you’d prefer to wait, we’ll have a preview of Big Sur up soon. So stay tuned.