Public beta for High Sierra is here, and boy, we didn’t see this kind of mess since Lion. This devastation is only comparable to the first release of public beta OS X Lion, and if you are in for it, you won’t be disappointed. I’m not even sure how developers are supposed to work with this shit.

That being said, there are several things you must know before even checking out High Sierra. High Sierra comes with lots of behind the scene improvements, lower-level, core improvements. One of the things Apple Keynote mentioned was the new APFS that will replace aging HFS+, which has already happened on all iOS 10 devices. So if you came here with the expectation APFS included in High Sierra would be stable enough, WRONG. The very act of connecting HFS+ formatted external drive may as well cause another kernel panic (real story). APFS was only tested on mobile environment, don’t jump to the conclusions like I did.

Enrolling into public beta will also make your Mac be automatically enrolled for the public beta of Sierra. Although newest line of macOS is already announced, that doesn’t stop Apple from supporting the existing OS till the official release. Public beta of Sierra is rather moot; it wouldn’t and won’t have any system-wide affects. You can stay enrolled to the public beta of Sierra, but if you are here for High Sierra like I am, I wouldn’t advise it. Stick to the official release is my usual go-to lines.

Same with the Photos app. What they promised is stunning, but if you are like myself, who keeps the Photos Library on an external drive, you wouldn’t want to try it. Also, public beta does not come with a tool that will revert your library back to the earlier version’s. In other words, if you happened to upgrade your Photos or iTunes library along with your Mac, you can only go forward. These libraries vary from at least 100GB to some TBs, so do not ever upgrade your main library.

New features in Safari was also promising, but soon failed. With all the hiccups, it was inevitable. However, the biggest problem on newest Safari on its own was the slight but frequent lag. It stops once and so often. It doesn’t crash, just freezes. I expect these sort of problems be resolved before GM, but considering the track record, I can’t say this is high on priority fix list.

Considering the Sierra (10.12)’s public beta release, second public beta is due in no time. If you are somehow interested in upgrading, at least wait for the second public beta.

As for the eGPU everyone is excited about, don’t upgrade to 1st public beta of High Sierra, just for the native support. It will not be worth it.