Matisyahu's Blog

Apple released a series of updates for all their platforms with the system firmware and wifi firmware being updated with the latest update with many security bugs being fixed in macOS (link) along with bumping the Safari version from 17 to 17.1. There have been some improvements in Webextesions support, there is still a lot of work going on in terms of standardising parts of the emerging Webextensions API MV3 (link). It’ll be interesting to see what happens next year (and the coming years) as many of these APIs are eventually agreed upon – most of the time Chrome implements them the quickest due to having most of the ground work already laid but Safari lags in terms of implementation because they’re having to be implemented from the ground up.

Android 14/Nothing OS 2.5 is rumoured to be released at the end of this year but it is interesting to see how other OEMs are taking the release of Android 14 extra seriously based on the number of beta releases that Samsung have put out. The most recent beta is beta 9 of One UI (the brand that Samsung market their customised version of Android 14 under) with rumours that it’ll be released a week after beta 9 was released but that is all speculation at this point. There was a recent interview linked to on the Android subreddit where the developer talked about changes internally (the development process that occurs within Google) which makes me wonder whether we’re going to start seeing features being announced then pushed out through ‘Project Mainline’ where Google can add features without having to go through the OEMs to get the features on the phone.

Qualcomm made some big announcements in the area of bringing the Oryon core to the laptop space along with announcing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 which will find their way into the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S24 series which will be released some time early next year.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the new government is sworn in particularly when there are negotiations at the moment along with a minibudget that Nicola Willis that she announced on the campaign trail. It’ll be interesting to see whether the tax cuts are delivered. Personally I think they’ll deliver bracket and IETC adjustment along with the revenue enhancing measures but they could kick the can down the road when it comes to mortgage interest deductions on rental properties. The one thing to keep in mind is the fact that they never gave a time line which means they could do it incrementally or come up with a compromise – assuming that it turns into an National-ACT-NZ First coalition government.