Apple issues second public beta of macOS 10.12.2

By Roger Fingas

Apple on Wednesday released a second public beta of macOS 10.12.2, refining the update's fixes and features for people wanting the earliest possible access.

The software is available to anyone in Apple's Beta Software Program. People signed up for it should be able to download it through the Mac App Store's Updates tab.

The original 10.12.2 public beta was released about a week ago. So far it's not clear what if any changes have been made, whether in the public or recent developer seeds.

As a whole, though, 10.12.2 is mostly a maintenance release. The only feature addition of note is new and redrawn emoji, conforming to Unicode 9.0 and matching the character sets in iOS 10.2 and watchOS 3.1.1.

Separately, Apple has released a new build of the iOS 10.1.1 update, 14B150. The original build, 14B100, emerged on Oct. 31, and it's unknown what if anything has been tweaked -- 14B150 can't be downloaded if a person already has 10.1.1 installed.