Historically, it has always been pretty easy to run a macOS beta beside a released version. Admittedly, it’s been a few years for me, though. This year, I’ve been playing with a macOS app and a friend of mine reported a couple of glitches, so I wanted to try and fix those up.

However, I could not find a straight answer for how to do this. The posts I found from Big Sur / Monterey beta referenced a full installer, which I cannot find for Ventura (see update below).

Worse, when I tried just installing the beta profile and letting System Preferences start the update, it was clear it was going to upgrade to Ventura in-place (versus letting me select a target volume).

So, my basic gameplan ended up being install a second copy of Monterey, then upgrade that.

Here’s the play-by-play:

  • Download the macOS Monterey full installer from the App Store. You’ll eventually send up with /Applications/install macOS Monterey.app (and it will probably auto-launch)
  • While that downloads, create a separate APFS volume with Disk Utility. I named my “Ventura”
  • Once it downloads, run the macOS Monterey installer; select “Ventura” as the target volume
  • Get a reply on Twitter from @bwebster with a link to the full installer from Apple’s CDN. Doh!
  • Oh well. Keep going.
  • Installer reboots the computer (a few times).
  • Finalize the macOS Monterey setup (I opted to reuse the account from the other volume) and skipped most of the optional services (iCloud, etc.).
  • Yay! Clean Monterey desktop 🤪
  • Download the beta profile from the Developer Portal. Find macOSDeveloperBetaAccessUtility.pkg and run it. This should kick off a Software Update inside System Preferences and begin downloading macOS 13 Beta.
  • Run Tweetbot (from the primary volume). Realize timeline sync won’t work. Sign in to iCloud, but disable Photos.
  • Reboot for Ventura update process
  • Success!