Apple Seeds Second Beta of macOS Sonoma 14.1 to Developers
Apple today seeded the second beta of an upcoming macOS Sonoma 14.1 update to developers for beta testing, with the update coming just a week after the launch of the first beta.
Registered developers can opt-in to the beta through the Software Update section of the System Settings app. Under Beta updates, simply toggle on the Sonoma Developer Beta. Note that an Apple ID associated with an Apple Developer account is required to get the beta.
macOS Sonoma 14.1 includes updates for the Music app, introducing an option to favorite songs, albums, artists, and more. No other major new additions have been found in the beta as of yet, but there are several promised features that did not make it into the macOS Sonoma launch.
Apple says that these features are coming in an update later this year, so we could begin seeing some of them in this beta.
Additions we are waiting on include interactive Music widgets, iCloud Sync improvements, the option to use Stickers through the Tapback menu in Messages, Intelligent form detection and Enhanced AutoFill for PDF documents and forms, an option to complete words by pressing the space bar, collaborative playlists in the Music app, and a favorite songs playlist.
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Top Rated Comments
But, given that they’re still selling an M1 MacBook Air and an M1 iPad Air and an M1 iMac, I think it’s safe to say that they still have several years of support.
But these days it’s really quite unpredictable what they will do.
Right now they seem to be cutting off support for any devices that are five years old or older, but that probably has a lot more to do with them trying to kill off old Intel code and older “A” series chips without neural engines.
Definitely will be interesting to see how long the 2020-2022 products get software support, especially since many of them are still the most current.
My personal prediction (which could be totally wrong) is that 2025 will be the first Apple Silicon only macOS, and given that the M1 is based off of the A14, iOS 19 and macOS 16 will work on all iPhones and Macs from late 2020 and newer.
Then I expect Apple to keep these exact same system requirements for 2026 and 2027, before dropping M1 in 2028 and M2 in 2030.
But I would love to be wrong, and I hope that the M1 gets a full 10 years or more.
macOS 14.1 beta 2 (23B5056e)
* Safari Version 17.1 (19616.2.8.11.2)
* System Firmware Version: 10151.40.171.501.2 (M1 based Macs)
* Darwin Kernel Version 23.1.0: Tue Sep 26 22:11:17 PDT 2023; root:xnu-10002.40.89.501.1~3/RELEASE_ARM64_T8103 arm64
macOS 14.1 beta (23B5046f)
* Safari Version 17.1 (19616.2.6)
* System Firmware Version: 10151.40.132 (M1 based Macs)
* Darwin Kernel Version 23.1.0: Thu Sep 14 23:07:43 PDT 2023; root:xnu-10002.40.63.505.1~3/RELEASE_ARM64_T8103 arm64
Betas on the other hand are different in this regard. For many years there would be a large number of build numbers associated with the same version number.
So it is quite common simply to check the build number to ascertain if a beta had been successfully installed.
Furthermore if you know anything about ipsw files, build numbers together with model identifiers help in ascertaining the correct one to download.