< Notes...

After so much wait for iOS 26.1, and the inclussion of Vietnamese for use in Live Translation, I feel nothing short of dissappointed. Mum says the translation is an abomination, and begged me to, please, not to use it. Sometimes she gets confused with the service being used, but the end result is what matters. She messaged me, using her classical english:

“Stop writing in Vietnamese. Translate from google, totally different from what you think or what you want to say.”

Apple’s new iPhone Pocket feels like something one would read on April Fools’ Day, which is how I felt when they first came out with their Polishing Cloth. Alas, it is not! 😅

Update: 11 Nov 2025 @ 12:22:15

Holy fuck! Please pardon my Icelandic, but what in the world?! Somewhere on my April Fools’ thought I missed the most important piece of information.

“iPhone Pocket in the short strap design retails at $149.95 (U.S.), and the long strap design at $229.95 (U.S.).”

If this comes true, that is, front facing camera and Face ID components becoming invisible on a 20th Anniversary iPhone, then it will be my time to upgrade.

“Notarize your macOS software to give users more confidence that the Developer ID-signed software you distribute has been checked by Apple for malicious components. Notarization of macOS software is not App Review. The Apple notary service is an automated system that scans your software for malicious content, checks for code-signing issues, and returns the results to you quickly.”

Apple’s notarisation service is good for the user, and developers—the last need to pay $99 a year for it. Yet, there are some that believe the Apple’s notarisation blocks software “freedom”.

➝ Via Hacker News.

The corner radius alignment—or lack thereof—on macOS 26 has been bothering me from day one. Specifically for the two applications I run maximised at all times, Safari and Terminal. Will Apple fix it (my hope)? Is it behaving as intended (my biggest fear)?

As a side twist to yesterday’s Amazon outage, and, perhaps, unrelated, I woke up this morning with an extra 127 unread old emails on my iCloud+ inbox. Emails I had already deleted, or archived. Not a warm fuzzy feeling, at all.

Looking forward to iOS 26.1 with excitement and anxiety. Vietnamese has been added to Apple Intelligence, and thus it becomes possible to use it on Live Translation.

Now, that could be a total disaster if the person you are translating from Vietnamese to English doesn’t use the proper diacritics. 😬

Today was Apple’s Day. They announced a new MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, all with the new M5 Apple silicon SoC. 🥳

On a different topic, it was not F5—“a global scale and industry-leading converged application delivery and security platform”—Day, as they shared they had been breached by a “highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor”. 💀

I want to go back to start using email more, like I used to. I am looking into participating more on mailing lists, and overall using email more for communication for which I have been using non-asynchronous apps. I prefer to use the apps provided by the OS, as I have mentioned it before. The thing is, macOS mail app has a couple of things that the “email perfectionist” in me dislikes. A lot. I am one of those, yes. Let’s see:

• No strict threading, that is, using in-reply-to and message-id to properly create threads. It seems that the iOS/macOS Mail app will not exclusively use those, often using subjects to group emails.
• No way to set quoted text to start with the venerable > Internet “standard”. Apple Mail insists on using their colored |.

So, that’s the pickle, my pickle. Will I dust off mutt, or Thunderbird? Ugh, I don’t want to, but…

My most favourite Spotlight function (search for a word definition on Dictionary) is broken. It is my second most used feature on Spotlight, with the first being to open applications as my Dock has only Finder and Bin. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. I would not mind if that tiny scrollbar shown above also goes away. Thank you, Tim Apple!

With the release of iOS 26, it is iOS 7 all over again. It is also Mac OS X, “the re-run”, with the release of macOS 26. Complain we must, it matters not.

“The new iOS 7 is horrible. It looks like something grade schoolers designed. The colors are too bright. It is very distracting when you have to squint looking at different apps due to the harshness […]. There is no point in keeping something that is so horrible to use.”

“Just “up"graded my iPhone to iOS 26 and I absolutely hate it. It’s visually the ugliest iOS Apple has ever produced […]. It’s so ugly I’m thinking of cancelling my iPhone Air order and looking at Samsung options.”

For as much as I liked Steve Jobs, I didn’t know him personally. I liked (and still do) how he was presented to us. I know now that he had many issues of his own. This user comment on Hacker News made sense to me:

“One part of his legacy that will forever be misunderstood is that being brutally honest, being demanding, being abrasive is a trait that only translates to success when you are at the top. Countless mid level managers believe it is the only way to lead.

For Steve Jobs, it’s not that being an asshole was his secret sauce. It’s that his unique position allowed him to survive the downsides of his personality.”

Today marks the 14th anniversary of Steve Jobs death, at the age of 56.

I am having a not-so-first world problem. Nine out of ten, when I go out for an outdoor walk, I forget to start the workout either on phone, or watch. The watch, on its infinite wisdom sometimes reminds me, or prompts me to start it—notice the emphasis in sometimes. Is there an easy trick to get a workout going, other than starting (and stopping) it manually?

This mug (made in Japan) is only available for purchase at Apple’s Apple Park Visitor Centre. You can find it on eBay, and other second hand places, at exorbitant prices. Alex, a friend of mine, got me this one by driving 30 minutes from his house to the store—I wish I was as lucky as him, living so close to “The Mothership”! I have wanted this mug for a long time, and I love it! Thank you Alex!

Having the Apple Watch unlock—and login automatically on—the Mac feels like magic. Yet another reason to have this device on my wrist.

I am wearing a watch (Apple Watch) for the first time in, like, 25 years. It isn’t to tell the time. Not at all. It is almost exclusively for health reasons (95%), and fast communication/keeping up-to-date (5%). Just like the iPhone I have, which I use for almost everything but as a phone, the Apple Watch is almost anything, but a watch. I’ll say, it is a wrist-held computer.

On this one, upgraded to Tahoe last night. This time I didn’t do a wipe-install, but a regular upgrade. Simply restarted the mini—which has been running without reboot for a couple of months, or so—and went through the upgrade. Smooth, no issues.

I have macOS 26 to install and play with, and today, out of all days, I am stuck working past 3.5 hours my quitting time.

So, about the Apple Event today, I am planing to get an Apple Watch 11, likely for Christmas, or Epiphany. Tempted by the AirPods Pro 3, but not quite sure I will get them. Excellent event, as always!

Today is “the day”. I will say—or, rather, write—no more.

Yep, it is happening again—like each year, LOL. Christmas is (might?) coming early, everyone! Add the Apple event to your calendars, and be there or be square!

A user on Slashdot, referring to Steve Wozniak’s decision of selling his Apple stock, wrote: “Smart man. Great engineer. Bad decision. Happens to all of us.” To which Woz himself replied:

“I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.”

I know this is about business, yet, I still hear the question in my head, why? As presidencies are ephemeral, can’t Apple widthstand the rough seas for 3.5 years?

Coming across a few MacPaint arts from the mid-1980s brought me a lot of memories, even though I saw them in the early 1990s. I remember vividly when I got my very first Mac around that time (Performa 575) at Sears. Over $2,000.

➝ Via Decryption.

I know it is way early, but in preparation for macOS 26 I have now removed Raycast, and will soon remove Maccy. Who knows what else I will be able to remove when 26 comes. I really can’t help it.

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is coming up once more and, as always, I feel like kid before Christmas. The rumours I allowed myself to read tell something about Tahoe, and version 26, to match with year. Let’s see.

It is here, now! “Tune” in! Liquid Glass, oh my! Absolutely loving the upcoming updates for all versions 26s. With iPadOS 26, the iPad becomes one step closer (but not quite, since “macOS is superior”, as George pointed out) to becoming a “lite” laptop.

Apple’s Lisa 2 computer. I know it is old, I know it is retro. My old eyes will certainly complain at the screen size and resolution, but damn, such a beautiful machine, and keyboard design! Yup, I am certainly on “boomer’s” mood.

John Gruber describes fluidly why the dream of making iPhones in the United States is just sheer fantasy.

“United States doesn’t have anyone with the necessary vocational skills, who would want to work tedious factory jobs at factory-job wages, and China does. That’s part of the fever-dream mad-king fantasy of this entire cockamamie endeavor by Trump: these are difficult, low-paying, long-houred jobs that Americans don’t want. That these jobs are all in China and India is proof that America is far ahead, not that we’ve fallen behind.”

Of course I agree! Asking Apple to make the iPhones in the US is rotten non-sense coming out of a necrotic mind.

I know it is a complex relationship—just like any other big company CEO—that of Tim Cook and Trump. Yet, Tim should have never donated money to Trump’s inauguration, nor attended to it. If favours were what he was after, he failed. He should have known better.

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” he said. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.”

Since when does a US president have the rights to interfere with free commerce, without congressional oversight?

Apple has announced their latest Mac mini, and it’s everything I wanted to see. The task ahead is to convince partner that we need one (note that’s a need, not a want), which we do (well, we need a computer, not an Apple computer per se, but I wouldn’t have it any other way). Yet, I need to do the convincing without adding any stress. Let’s see how I can engineer to do so. Certainly with extreme finesse.

I have decided to use Apple’s Journal app more. Towards that aim I have placed it on my mobile device home screen. That will not interfere with any of my public interactions, as Journal will simply be that, a personal journal, and thus not for public comsumption.

My aim is to document the mundane, “what did I eat last night?” kind of thing, to recollect, and preserve, daily happenings and thoughts at day’s end.

And… the first two are here! Took a little over 1 hour to transfer data to mine. Kid’s will have to wait until after pickleball. The 16 Pro’s soooo buttery smooth. Oh my!

Tomorrow is the day. Cases are already here, all that’s missing is the VIP. 🤣 Oh, and I will have to buy new cables too (USB-C), but that will be easy, and paintless (Amazon for the win!).

Well, “that” deed is done! 🥳 Now the wait starts. Some will deliver on 20th September, other will not arrive until October! 😩😂

Now, this is some promise!

When we launch Private Cloud Compute, we’ll take the extraordinary step of making software images of every production build of PCC publicly available for security research. This promise, too, is an enforceable guarantee: user devices will be willing to send data only to PCC nodes that can cryptographically attest to running publicly listed software. We want to ensure that security and privacy researchers can inspect Private Cloud Compute software, verify its functionality, and help identify issues — just like they can with Apple devices.

I feel like I am late to the party for not having dropped a note here right after, or during, Apple’s WWDC. Yes, I saw it live. Yes, I am excited about iOS/iPadOS/tvOS 18, and macOS 15. Of course I don’t have a problem with the way Apple is implementing AI (which, from now on, stands for “Apple Intelligence”). I love it all, and can’t wait for it!

It is that time of the year again, with less than two weeks to Apple’s WWDC (which has run yearly since 1983). Looking forward to see what’s to come to iOS, and macOS!

On the U.S. suing Apple on iPhone’s monopoly (is that even a thing?!), a comment on The New York Times:

“I bought, own and use an iPhone from Apple because I like it. I like that Apple creates what I think is a safer environment, and that my data is better protected. I like how smoothly it works. In fact, I’m ecstatically happy with it. Much more than I am with most products I purchase and use.

I am looking at cars, and find that there are tech products that use proprietary technology and require subscriptions. Tesla will charge me to activate an auto garage door opener that’s already installed in their $50,000 car. BMW wants me to pay a subscription to use a heated seat that I’d buy (and own) with the car.

I suppose I don’t have to buy a Tesla or BMW (and I’m not). People also don’t have to buy an iPhone.

For those who want them, don’t wreck the features we buy it for. That seems the antithesis of a competitive market.”

Thank you, George, for spoiling a few shows and movies for me. This is something I hadn’t correlated, but now cannot miss. Ha!

Film director Rian Johnson has lifted the lid on a secret in the world of product placement – Apple will not allow its kit to be used by a villainous character on screen.

“Apple, they let you use iPhones in movies, but – and this is very pivotal – if you’re ever watching a mystery movie, bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera,” Johnson, whose credits include Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Looper and Knives Out, revealed in a video recorded for Vanity Fair.

I have decided to move from 1Password (for which I pay a yearly subscription) to iOS native Passwords before the year is over. The ability to share passwords with family tilted me over. I will not wait for Passwords to become an app of its own—though I am sure that’s coming—because I don’t think that should hold me back now.