There are only full installers for OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) beta releases

Originator:craig.hockenberry
Number:rdar://22307567 Date Originated:17-Aug-2015 08:29 AM
Status:Open Resolved:
Product:OS X Product Version:10.11
Classification:Serious Bug Reproducible:Always
 
Summary:

In order to test the latest version of El Capitan on a new machine, you have to download the first beta of OS X 10.11, the second beta of OS X 10.11, the third beta of OS X 10.11, the fourth beta of OS X 10.11, the fifth beta of OS X 10.11, the sixth beta of OS X 10.11, and the Nth beta of OS X 10.11.

Each of these full installers weighs in at 2-3 GB and many of the people you want to test this release are on network connections that are well under 100 Mbit. It’s not hyperbolic to say this can take several days.

Steps to Reproduce:

1) Get the latest beta release of 10.11.

Expected Results:

You should be able to get to the latest revision level with a single download.

Actual Results:

You currently need to download all beta releases to get to the current revision level.

Regression:

Previous OS X beta releases have had incremental and full installers available.

Notes:

The current situation acts as a disincentive for testing your releases. If it takes me three days to install the beta on a new Mac, I’m going to avoid it whenever possible.

If you want to have the widest possible adoption of your new software, this is not the way to do it.

Comments

Worse, I went to the trouble to set up a Mac Mini on 10.11 and set up caching server. None of these downloads are cached, so all of them hit the wire and Apple's CDN / servers. If Apple can't spare the bandwidth to roll a combo updater, at least let us cache the images locally using the functionality of caching server from server.app.

By ciderconsulting at Aug. 17, 2015, 3:38 p.m. (reply...)

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