Success, or, How I Got Back From El Capitan Beta-town to Actual OS X

You know, I’ve been stuck on 10.11 Beta (15A279b) for I don’t even know how long. I was told on Reddit & Hopeinen Omena that I have to wipe my drive and start from scratch, and that Apple have steadfastly warned that if you install El Capitan Beta, you have to start from scratch in order to get to El Capitan Public Release.

I drank the Kool-Aid and went “I guess I’m stuck in Beta-town forever, then”.

I would obviously sometimes download the OS X El Capitan Installer.app from the Mac App Store, and come up with some form of “No, you can’t” while trying to install it, and be dumped back to Beta-town.

But today I thought, hang on.. Surely there has got to be a way! I can’t be the only one… I went through about 7 different webpages on this topic, and I think about 3 or 4 suggested doing a little work on the Terminal. Ultimately,

softwareupdate — clear-catalog

was the thing that “did something”. Namely, “Changed catalog to Apple production”. Sounds pretty fancy, right? I went and downloaded the regular OS X El Capitan Installer.app from the Mac App Store, started the installation process, waited the requisite 39 minutes, entered my AppleID password to activate iCloud, clicked Next some more, logged in.. and saw this:

Case closed. I’m back from Beta-town.

The first thing I noticed? Messages now shows obscure Emojis instead of a [?] graphic. The second thing? The April 28th 2016 iMovie update installed.

That third thing? Safari 10.0. Seed 4!