Went over to mum’s house for dinner tonight and updated all her devices at home – the PC upstairs updated to Windows 11 26H2 and it is robust without any issues but then again I don’t fiddle with settings other then setting it up and installing updates when they appear. It is a Beelink mini-PC and so far it has been pretty robust with great performance – it has a strixhalo AMD SoC with 32GB of memory so out of the box everything just works. The funny part is that at one stage I was going to purchase a Belink SER10 MAX AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 but in the end I purchased a Mac Studio because as much as I have my complaints with Apple the complains pale in comparison to what I would have to deal with if I was Windows 11.
There are rumours that there will be a product refresh next week – Apple TV, HomePod and HomePod mini with leakers pointing to hardware upgrades that’ll enable the new Siri AI to run on these devices. With the shortage of components I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up seeing there being a premium being charged for them when compared to the previous version. I’m personally looking forward to 27.3 or maybe a later release for some of the improvements show cased in the Safari Technology Preview releases make their way into the mainstream release. I think the biggest leap forward for people who make use of extensions on Safari will be once the offscreen API is fully implemented – what is implemented in Safari Technology 253 are the first steps to hopefully seeing maybe it appearing in a future update of Apple’s platform.
Chrome 155 appears to be shipping tomorrow (based on the Chrome platform status website) which has some modest improvements. With Chrome 156 scheduled for release in two weeks time which comes with a big change related to the IndexedDB implementation. Many websites make use of IndexedDB and based on the notes related to the change (link) it will be interesting to see whether there is a marked improvement in the reliability of Chrome when dealing webapps that make extensive use of such an API. Salesforce for example makes extensive use of it for client side functionality so when it rolls out to both Edge and Chrome I’ll get to test it in a real work environment and see how it performs.
