Matisyahu's Blog

I finished work and went for a walk and tonight I decided to go for a 17.4km walk but funny enough I decided to time myself to see how much my fitness had improved and what I have found is that to do 5.8km it had gone from around 1 1/2 hours when I first started to 1 hour and 10 minutes down 1 hour and now it is 50 minutes. The benefit of getter fitter has been having a lot more energy – when I want to go out and do something I have the energy to do it without having to constant sit down to rest because my back hurts or my feet or legs hurt. There is the icing on the cake of losing weight and fitting into clothes but the bigger benefit is the quality of life improvement – being able to live a fuller life without all the aches and pains.

I was having a look on the Apple website because I’m still pondering about getting a desktop because I want to get one but I also want to make sure I am making the right decision. For me the Apple Mac Mini looks good but the question is whether I should wait for the M5 or whether the M4 is good enough because I don’t think there is going to be a major leap other than maybe the adoption of the new N1 chip for wifi and bluetooth which will be wifi 7 compatible. With that all being said, I do enjoy watching the money sit in my bank account and the security of knowing it is there and I have no debt at all. The other thing is what is going to happen with macOS 26.x – my big focus is on Safari and whether the bug that I am following will get fixed up along with the visual bugs that many have reported with the new release. I could imagine we’ll see two 26.x updates before Christmas.

The other part is looking at the iPhone 17 Pro Max – currently there is 3-4 week wait time so even if I jumped ship now it wouldn’t appear until October which is rumoured when the next product refresh is. I’m kind of sceptical because I went on the Apple website to price up some computer gear and apart from the iPhone 17 Pro Max I don’t see there being long led times which indicate that they have plenty of stock vs if they were running down inventory for a product refresh then generally you’ll start to see the led times get longer for some product models as they reduce inventory in preparation for the product refresh. I could be wrong and the current M4 are lowered in price to become the entry level model with the M5 being where the current M4 fit. I guess I’ll need to wait and see – no hurry as things are going very well so far with my laptop.

The problems with iCloud though still remains particularly with the limited number of aliases and should I make greater use of the ‘hide my email’ service or should I just use Exchange Online for my email but use ICloud for everything else? has the Mail app fixed up its issues when it comes to populating aliases for custom domains or do they need to be added manually? so many questions that really need to be answered because if the issues that pushed me away from the Apple ecosystem still exist then I’m better off staying where I am.

Chrome was updated from Version 140.0.7339.128 to Version 140.0.7339.186 where as Edge was updated from 140.0.3485.66 to 140.0.3485.81. I have to admit, I do like Microsoft Edge because Microsoft makes use of their own grammar and spell checking which is so much better than what Google provides with Chrome even if you enabled ‘Enhanced spell checker’ in Chrome settings. It makes me kind of wonder what a modern Windows Mobile 11 would be like with Edge being the default browser and whether the app situation would have been different knowing that many apps make use of WebView 2 along with web technologies – my own banking app being a good example of that.