I woke up this morning at 8:30 am and it was raining heavily outside so I decided to have a doze in bed while listening to the rain on the roof. I eventually got up and out of bed, opened the curtains to let what little sun flood into the room and then I jumped back into bed to see what Apple had announced with their recent presentation. I have to to say I was underwhelmed – keeping in mind that my expectations were already pretty low so it must have required some effort to be below my already low expectations. I was expecting big HomePod to be updated but only the mini was (maybe they’ll announce a refresh of it on 27 October?).
Then there was the HomeView ‘smart home hub’ – it’ll be interesting to see how much demand there is for it when compared to just having a HomePod mini for voice commands and an iPhone or iPad to control devices around the home. I have to admit that part of me is asking “what solution is this trying to solve” but I guess if I’m asking that question then it is a subtle hint that maybe this isn’t a product designed for someone like me. The Apple TV got a much needed update with support for AV1 playback support along with many other benefits that come from moving to the A19 SoC (such as Siri AI support) but with that being said the price has gone up to an eye watering NZ$599 vs NZ$319 when I originally bought my Apple TV device not too long ago.
I checked for the weekly update and Google has released an update for Chrome (link) which has bumped the version from 155.0.8059.40 to 155.0.8059.80 and once again quite a few security holes have been fixed in the release. Chrome 156 is scheduled to be released on 21 October which has quite a few under the hood changes. When it comes to version 27.2 of Apple’s platform, beta 4 has been released recently released and based on previous updates we may see a release candidate with the next build release. Personally I think what Apple needs to do is make their operating system update release modular – more specifically have Safari on a quicker release schedule so that it is decoupled from operating system updates in much the same way Chrome is updated seperately from Android builds via the Play Store.
