Malcolm Owen
Apple has made the fifth developer beta versions of High Sierra 10.13.4, iOS 11.3, and tvOS 11.3 available for download by testers, just one week after the company shipped the fourth betas of each operating system.
Apple pre-announced the main features included in iOS 11.3, with the features including Health Records and new additions to the Animoji roster. Subsequent betas introduced Apple's battery health feature, which warns users if the iPhone is throttled, in the event the battery is considered too worn to operate at full throttle.
While earlier betas included support for AirPlay 2, the fourth beta released on February 20 removed the functionality.
The fifth iOS 11.3 beta has the build number 15E211a, while the previous fourth beta release from March 5 had build 15E201e.
High Sierra 10.13.4's first beta included warnings for users if they ran 32-bit apps in macOS. Apple has previously warned that High Sierra will be the last version of macOS to support 32-bit apps "without compromise," suggesting users should consider upgrading to 64-bit versions where available in the future.
The same beta also introduced Messages in iCloud, which synchronized a user's Messages "stack" across multiple iOS devices logged into the same iCloud account, allowing users to get their apps wherever they wanted. Lastly, the beta made improvements to how High Sierra deals with eGPUs.
The second beta renamed the iBooks app to "Books," mirroring a rebrand seen in the first iOS 11.3 beta, but has since reverted back as part of the fourth iOS beta.
The current High Sierra 10.13.4 beta has build number 17E182a, while the fourth beta released on March 5 used 17E170e.
The first tvOS 11.3 beta added rating-based content filtering options to its device management, as well as updating its content matching facility and adding automatic mode switching, a feature included in the Apple TV 4K but brought to the fourth-generation Apple TV for the first time. The release also included AirPlay 2 support, but this was removed in the third beta.
The latest tvOS 11.3 beta has build number 15L5208a, up from the last beta's build number of 15L198d.
Update: As usual, Apple has also released public beta versions of iOS and macOS.
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10 Comments
Must be getting close with the release notes paring down.
Still some lingering bugs here on beta 4, dock disappeared once, folders sometimes close without an animation, and podcasts seem to skip/warble audio every few minutes, but it's mostly been stable.
I hope for the final version they bring back 10.3's lightning quick home button which was fast enough to cancel an opening app animation midway.
It would be nice if the article explicitly stated whether AirPlay 2 support was (or was not) put back. It simply says it was removed ... twice.
I'll be pretty disappointed if Airplay 2 isn't included., especially as they were touting it as a "coming soon" feature on the HomePod. Can't really believe how long it's taken them to release it, we're pushing on toward a year since it was originally announced. iCloud message sync is the only thing of any significance really that's new in 11.3, and that was promised in 11.0. What has Apple been doing between 11.2 and 3?!