Hopefully these beta builds will be ineligible to write AppStore reviews or leave ratings, especially if this is ever extended to iOS. It was quite sad (and no doubt frustrating for developers) to see apps rated 1 star because "GARBAGE! DOESN'T WORK IN IOS7!!!!1" before iOS was even GM.
Yeah, this makes me so happy that I am not in the App Store right now. But for the same reason, I have to assume that this will only be relatively late-stage betas — encouraging ordinary schmoes to install known-unstable versions of your OS is a recipe for bad PR no matter how many caveats you throw at them.
that's what I'm assuming but Apple PR hasn't responded with clarification. Pre-release doesn't have the same stigma as some of the builds, so that's encouraging.
I'd assume it's not just for bug testing but also user-feedback on specific features/functions/usability issues. For instance, the 4K scaling in 10.9.3.
4 and 4S can decently run the latest OS version. The 3G and 3GS were really bad in this respect, but all devices supported now are pretty decent. There can be performance problems, but apart from real time games I don't think it's a widespread issue (users of these devices are already used to general slowness)
Do you really consider the iPhone 4/4S obsolete? To me this sounds like an unrealistic idea of real-world upgrade schedules. The iPhone 4S was released in October 2011. I would hope that a device of cost O($1000) would last more than 2.5 years.
