This is Technology Bytes, episode 163 for April 19th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
Today I’m talking about tech support, and in a previous microcast on this channel, station, whatever that’s called, I talked about tech support already.
In that instance, I was talking about the fact that many people, family members and friends, especially who use Apple products, look to me for technical support on the use or potential issues or problems with their Apple products.
And I think I’ve talked about the ever-mythical Apple card that says, I have this non-existing Apple card that says I know Apple products and I understand their tech, and if I don’t solve someone’s problem when it comes to Apple products, I might lose my Apple card.
And so that’s always something that’s kind of hanging there for me to do tech support well for my friends and family.
The problem is, this week I’m talking about self-tech support.
So what happens when I have a problem with my technology, something that isn’t working properly, and how do I go about fixing that?
And I think I mentioned last week or maybe the week before, anyway, there’s some issues that I have with Safari in 26.5 Beta 1, and then it turns out that it didn’t get fixed in Beta 2, and there’s one website that I use at work, one tool that is self-created at work, not by me, but by our tech team, that I cannot get 26.5 Beta 2 Safari to connect to.
It either tells me the server stops responding or it thinks I’m offline.
It doesn’t even get to the page.
So it’s kind of a bit of a trouble system because I need that to get my work done.
Thankfully on my MacBook Air, as I mentioned previously, I can use Chrome and it will access that site, but there’s nothing on my iPad that lets me get to that site because everything uses WebKit and there’s something wrong in the WebKit interface to that particular site.
And so I think I’ve talked about the fact that I don’t use AI.
Maybe this is a time where I should ask AI how to fix it, but I don’t know.
One, I’m not sure exactly how to ask the question.
Two, I’m not convinced that AI is going to be better than the information that I’ve gotten so far from my web searches because the information seems pretty solid.
So what have I done to try to solve this problem?
Well, I did talk to my tech guy at work, and because I use Apple products and no one else does, and because it works on Chrome on my laptop, he’s not all that interested in spending much time trying to fix my iPad.
And I get that.
I don’t expect him really to do that.
But I was still going through to see what I could do.
So I turned on the developer stuff in Safari that gives me further access into making changes.
And the fact that if I run Chrome on my MacBook Air and it works, then I thought if I could have Safari act like it’s a Chrome browser, then it might work in Safari, but that is not the case.
But the one thing my tech guy at work said is, can you ping the website?
And so I put it in the terminal, and yep, it pings, and that round trip happens pretty well.
And he was watching to see what IP address it was going out to, and he said that is the correct address.
Everything looks right.
And so I thought it was interesting that I can ping the site, so I know it’s on the network, I know that my iPad sees it or my MacBook Air sees it, but I still can’t get the site to load.
So I’ve tried emptying caches, and I’ve tried doing all kinds of stuff and not having any success at all.
And it’s kind of interesting when I look on my iMac and look at the Web Inspector for the site because I didn’t update my iMac to the 26.5 betas because I saw that it had broken Safari and didn’t want that to happen with all of my hardware.
And so it’s kind of interesting because when I open the Web Inspector on my MacBook Air, it says it’s trying to go to the About page, and it’s blank.
On my iMac, it says that it’s going to the sales tool site, and it gives me all of the things about that site.
And even in that, looking at comparing, well, there’s nothing to compare because even though the MacBook Air asked me to log into the site and it takes my credentials, it doesn’t do anything after that.
It just does nothing.
There’s no information in the Web Inspector.
There’s nothing that I can see or find that has any indication of why I cannot connect to that particular tool at work.
Kind of interesting in that it worked through all of the betas of 26 since the inception.
I’ve had no problems from the early developer betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.
All of it worked.
Now when I went to the betas of what was the previous 18 or was it 17?
I don’t know what the number was before they switched it to this 26 version.
But I had a similar problem with my iPad connecting to that same tool when I did those early developer betas, but then it fixed and it stayed good that whole time until iOS 26 was released and it stayed good that whole time until just this 26.5 beta 1 and now also beta 2.
I also installed the tech development Safari.
It’s a way to look at the things that Apple’s working on for Safari tech in a kind of beta sense.
And I can’t get it to work in there.
So I am stumped.
I can’t figure out what I need to change.
I feel like there’s something in the server.
And I think if we do some update to that sales tool environment, we need to add a button, we need to add some functionality, and so it gets republished, I think that might help me.
But I don’t have any authority or anything to try to get that to happen in any particular time frame.
So in the meantime, I sit unsolved with some issues of being able to use my iPad well at work.
And that’s really too bad because that’s my mobile environment.
And so not having that information is a bit of a pain.
I make it work.
I work around it.
But it still causes some consternation.
I feel like if I had full access to all of that environment, so if I had access to the server and how it was presenting that website to the world, it doesn’t present it to the world because it has to go through a VPN, then maybe I could fix it.
But in the environment that I’m in right now, with the authority that I have right now, I just have to wait and hope that something that Apple did in those betas gets changed in the next one and it all comes back and starts working.
Because if it doesn’t, it creates quite a problem for me at work.
And I guess I need to be a little more careful when I update to betas, but I don’t know where to test it.
I mean, I can test it on my MacBook Air because I know Chrome will work, so it gives me at least a way to get to that tool at work.
But we shall see.
So, sad story, not able to get my own tech problem solved, and maybe losing my Apple Card, but this, I don’t know, this goes beyond that, and it’s very frustrating.
I guess I’m just sharing my frustration, sharing my story.
Don’t expect anyone to be able to solve this problem for me.
I think it’s going to solve, and I’m never going to know why, and I just wait for another beta to come out and then maybe be a little more careful.
But man, I like working in that new environment, new technologies, whatever, especially when iOS 27 comes out.
I’m really going to want to jump on that, I think.
So I got to be a little more patient, be a little more, yeah, I guess patient, and try not to break things.
The problem is, I never know if it’s going to break.
So I think if I put it on my MacBook Air first and it works, then I’m going to assume that it’ll work on my iPad, and then that MacBook Air will be my test bed because I can get Chrome to work for that tool and have that work-specific environment available to me in that mode.
That is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrigfamily.com.
That’s technologybytes at merrigfamily.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.
