This is Technology Bytes, episode 123, for July 13th, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this week I’m staying in the betas of the latest OS 26 versions, and this week Apple released beta 3 of all of their OSes across all of their platforms.
I don’t have everything because I don’t have the Vision Pro, but for the most part I have everything else.
So just a few things that stood out.
One is the liquid glass interface.
And while there is still a newness and a freshness to that interface, they’ve really dialed it back.
I read a couple things where people said they should call it frosted glass instead of liquid glass.
I really agree with that thought.
I liked what beta 2 did.
I understood dialing it back a little bit, but it feels like the pendulum has swung too far and we’ve lost some of the glass effect that Apple had shown us in the WWDC keynote.
So I hope that it swings the other way a little bit.
I really like that more glass effect as I scrolled through things and as the toolbars and buttons all changed because of what was happening in the background.
And I really want the liquid glass to be liquid glass.
So oftentimes I don’t talk about the stability of the betas for a couple times because the beta 1 could be a little bit rocky and no one should probably put it on in the developer sense unless you are a developer.
Developer beta 2 will add some stability probably by developer beta 3.
They’re really looking at releasing the public beta, which I don’t think has happened yet, maybe next week.
But there are some stability issues that I’ve noted.
The biggest one for me is Wi-Fi.
And I don’t know what it is and it only happens on my iPad and my iPhone.
It’s connected to Wi-Fi, but I’m losing the access to the Internet.
And I don’t understand that entirely.
I’ve reset the Wi-Fi network on both devices.
But oftentimes I’ll either need to turn it off or turn it back on.
At work I have two different Wi-Fi networks, so I connect to one for a while, connect to another for a while.
And sometimes the stability is great and it lasts like the entire day, but sometimes I have to go on and off and on and off.
So it’s a bit of a challenge and it’s been that way since beta 1 and it hasn’t gotten better, so that’s why I bring it up.
Other than that, most of the things that I use are working on a regular and stable basis, but beta 3, the Notes app on my iPad has decided to just crash.
And it’s happened two times and the beta’s been out for a few days.
And basically I have to go into the iCloud, turn off the Notes, delete it from my iPad, turn the Note syncing back on, and then let the Notes repopulate.
And it works for some period of time.
I don’t know what triggers it to not work.
It looks like all my Notes are there and they’re all synced properly, but that’s a bit of a pain and hopefully that gets fixed fairly quickly.
One other thing that I use quite a bit, it just happens, not that I use it, but the fact that Apple can turn my handwriting and make it a little neater in environments where I use the Apple Pencil.
And one of those is in Notes, and that’s been happening since iOS 18, which sounds like a long time ago because we’re on iOS 26, but we all know why that happened.
But it didn’t happen in other Apple apps, and the one that I think of the most is Freeform.
I use that a lot to take notes in meetings and things like that because it’s just so easy to use and to draw on and to use it as a big whiteboard.
It’s very good to use, and I like using it for taking notes.
And then I noticed, and I think it actually happened in maybe beta 2, that now Apple has applied that handwriting correction or making my handwriting more legible to Freeform.
So I really like that as well.
Something else that they talked about at WWDC was call screening, and I never saw or experienced it in beta 1 or 2, but in beta 3 I was at my desk, and of course my phone is connected to my computers, and I didn’t hear my phone ring because that’s the whole point of call screening is that numbers that aren’t in my contacts don’t ring through.
And so it said, you know, your phone is ringing, and then as the entity, person, whatever was leaving a message, it was putting it on the screen, so then it gave me two buttons, one to accept the phone call and have the conversation, or one to hang up.
And it was a sales call, and so I hung up.
But I had not seen that in action yet, and it’s pretty neat.
It makes my phone not ring when it’s somebody that I don’t know and gives me an opportunity to do something about it if I want to actually answer the phone call.
So we’ll see how that goes.
We’ll see if I like it.
So far, it was pretty cool.
The other thing that they did, and it seemed to make the news, maybe it’s just because, you know, very little change from beta 2 to beta 3, but they added some more wallpapers that are just for the iOS, iPadOS, macOS 26, whatever operating system you’re on, and they’ve added some other shades of colors to the beta wallpaper, as it were.
So they’re pretty cool.
You know, it gives you an opportunity to look at different hues and colors for the wallpaper, so that’s pretty fun.
But all in all, it remains stable.
My son ended up putting it on his iPhone when it came out, and we haven’t been together yet to talk about it.
But, you know, as betas go, it’s, you know, continued improvements.
Obviously, there’s always going to be some struggle.
Notes was never a problem before, and now in beta 3, it is a problem on my devices, and I need to be better at providing the feedback to Apple when things aren’t working, and I often just struggle through it, figure out how to make it work for the moment, and just hope that the next beta isn’t too far away.
But the whole point of running the beta is to provide that feedback, and I need to be better at that so that Apple knows what is broken, because maybe I use my devices different than other people.
But I’m still enjoying the beta, still enjoying the 26 versions of all the operating systems, and don’t plan on trying to jump off of that at all.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytesatmarigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
