Matisyahu's Blog

Well, I turned off my alarm on my phone because I decided to have a sleep in but I ended up waking up at around 9:45 am which kind of made the whole ‘turning off the alarm’ a bit pointless – oh well. I checked the time on my phone then opened up my laptop to check for software updates and to my surprise Apple has released 26.6 for all their platforms so I went about updating all my devices. The update includes a lot of security updates (link) so I’d strongly advise that you get your system updated as soon as possible.

On my iPhone 17 Pro Max the modem firmware was updated from 1.60.2 to 1.70.1 however the carrier profile has remained the same. On macOS the firmware has been updated from 18000.121.3 to 18000.161.9 and the WiFi firmware has been updated from:

wl0: Feb  2 2026 19:18:30 version 23.50.20.0.41.51.208 FWID 01-ef259bc2

IO80211_driverkit-1561.3 “IO80211_driverkit-1561.3” Apr 18 2026 17:42:26)

to:

wl0: Jul 10 2026 02:04:56 version 23.50.20.2.41.51.209 FWID 01-fa2c3dc1

IO80211_driverkit-1566.5 “IO80211_driverkit-1566.5” Jul 13 2026 20:07:09

When it comes to Apple Watch the modem firmware has remained the same at 1.51 however on the beta version of 27 the firmware has jumped to version 2.xx so it’ll be interesting to see what improvements it’ll bring. For me, I don’t have my watch linked up to any plan but that is mainly because I bring my phone with me when I go for a walk but I’m tempted to start using my Bluetooth headphones with the watch and copy my music to my Apple Watch so then it is one less thing I need to carry.

I’ve gone back to giving Safari another chance (the one of many chances) and so far it has been fairly reliable. There has been quite a few bugs fixed in this release (link) I would say that any of the big changes are going to come when version 27 is released. If the choice is between new features vs dealing with standards implementation bugs then I would sooner Apple spend the time getting the fundamentals working well rather than the next wiz bang feature.