5.4.0b1 is available

First off, a little holiday surprise for you all. Here's beta 1!
Unity is pretty much on vacation, so don't expect a lot of responses until the new year.

Also, fair warning that beta 2 won't arrive until mid January at the earliest with the holidays going on and ramping back up in the new year.
5.4 list of improvements and work:

• 2D 9-Slice
• 2D Sprite Tessellation Detail
• Basic GPU Instancing Support
• Cinematic Image Effects (see forum)
• Light Probe Proxy Volumes
• Retina Support
• Shader Uniform Arrays
• Texture Arrays

What is still in process that we'll probably land later:

• Splash screen update/consistency work
• VR Performance Optimization
• Various other performance optimizations

Also of note, system requirements:

• Webplayer officially dropped
• iOS will require 7.0 or higher (dropping 6.0)

With no further ado, release notes are available here:

http://unity3d.com/unity/beta/

Please remember to back up your projects before opening them in the beta build.

Best Regards,

Alex Lian