Matisyahu's Blog

One more day to go and the weekend cannot come soon enough. After work I went for another long walk because I needed to get some negative vibes out of my system after dealing with some ‘interesting’ customers – the sort that insist because they’ve watched a few episodes of Perry Mason that it somehow makes them a legal expert. Sure, I’m not legal expert myself given my background is in religious studies and philosophy but I at least have a degree of self awareness as to my limitations not to mention that I don’t throw around idle threats when I don’t get my own way.

Anyway, I had a look into the new release of the iPhone 17 to see what the details are and it is amazing the number of YouTube tech dude bros who believe that their opinion is the final say on any given matter. Dude, you’re one guy with a camera and a copy of Final Cut Pro, your opinion has no more weight behind it than any other rando posting their opinions on the internet (don’t get me started on the number of people who make videos who speak as though they’ve got constipation stressing and pushing out their words with over exaggerated articulation that sound unnatural to the point of being annoying).

I’ve had a look at a few videos and the design has a feeling of brutalism to it and the iPhone 17 Air reminds me of the Google Nexus 6P at the back of the phone. I do like the orange colour, maybe we’ll some some fun and whimsy come back in the space of information technology rather than the bland brushed aluminum we’ve been subjected to for almost two decades. As for the shape, I love the brutalist outward appearance but considering that I keep my phone in a leather case I’m happy with the changes.

There are rumours that there will be an event in October this year where Mac and Apple TV will receive a refresh along with a few other product lines. I’m in no hurry regarding getting a desktop so I’m going to see what Apple has in store. I’ve been following the development of maOS 26 – what I hope is that the glass effect over time will be toned down because at the moment the legibility and usability is undermined by something that may appear great on stage but in day to day use would drive me up the wall. Based on the fact that macOS 26 has already been released as a release candidate I wouldn’t expect UI changes until maybe the 26.x updates with the 26.1 being released a month or so before Christmas with maybe a 26.0.x release occurring if there is something that needs fixing promptly because it is a bug impacting a large number of end users.

There are rumours that of a Mac refresh based on last year there being the M4 refresh so it may happen that there is a M5 refresh which will be interesting to see the refresh when it comes to the MacBook and Mac mini line up. It’ll be also interesting to see how well macOS 26 performs and how quickly issues regarding Safari are fixed because I reported a bug that has existed in Safari for years and as of this post the issue hasn’t been fixed or even acknowledge by Apple developers (I’m not holding my breath that they’ll fix it).

As for how things are going with my Surface Laptop – the patch Tuesday for September went off without a hitch and 25H2 is probably going to be released maybe in the next month or two. 25H2 is based on the same foundation as 24H2 so the change shouldn’t be disruptive when compared to the move from 23H2 to 24H2 which was a jump from build 22631 to 26100 where as going from 24H2 to 25H2 is a jump from 26100 to 26200. As I’ve noted in the past, I would say that 26H2 will be another leap forward with some of the changes uncovered recently regarding dark mode will probably appear in 26H2 given that there is still a lot more that needs to be done to bring more WIndows components to supporting dark mode.

The reason why I think there will a delay for the dark mode support because there is still a lot of work going on behind the scenes, making use of XAML and the Windows App SDK, building up functionality, replacing components of the Windows shell piece by piece, testing those newly implemented features, making tweaks such as the colour of the progress graph reflecting the colours chosen etc. All of that takes time. I also think with the jump forward in build numbers it also points to support for ARM processors from more vendors such as nVidia and others. All of this takes time and to be honest I’d sooner they take their time rather than what was seen in Windows 10 with the drama of two big releases per year, things breaking, the lack of a way to separate the bleeding edge from beta from a preview to provide adequate testing before merging the change into the beta channel then evolve it to the preview channel.