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Apple ships MacOS X public beta for $30

Pay us to help us, says Mac maker

Apple has released its public beta, but only on CD and for those Mac users keen enough to shell out 25 quid or 30 bucks, depending on their country of residence.

The software will only be made available through the AppleStore, though we note that US buyers, unlike their European counterparts, have the option of buying a brand spanking new Power Mac G4 or a G4 Cube with the beta pre-installed.

According to Apple, the Mac OS X Public Beta is designed to run on all PowerPC 750 or 7400-based Macs - ie. all G3s and G4s - though not machines with CPU upgrade cards, we note, or the original PowerBook G3. It requires a minimum of 128MB of RAM.

"We're excited to have our users test drive this public beta version and provide us with their valuable feedback," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a statement. In other words, 'you pay us to help us test software that we can sell to you for even more money when the final release ships'. All this for software that "doesn't meet all of Apple's strict quality standards", according to the company's own FAQ.

Of course, there's no reason why Apple shouldn't make some cash out of the beta, and the cost of the software is low, but does the company have to be quite so disingenuous about it? Company spin doctors will point out the cost to Apple of shipping the software, and it's true, it does cost money to churn out thousands of CDs - about 20 pence or 50 cents apiece - and post them out to interested punters - a similar sum. But if that's the criterion on which the beta is priced, why not make it available as a free download?

We also note that the beta appears to require a copy of MacOS 9 to allow it to run your existing applications, allowing Apple to flog some more copies of its current OS too. It will be interesting to see whether the beta operates happily alongside older versions of the classic OS.

The public beta will expire on 15 May 2001. ®

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