This is Technology Bytes, episode 172, for June 21st, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
Last week I talked about WWDC 2026 and some of my initial thoughts on that.
I think at the end of it I had told you that I installed the betas on all of my devices and things were going well.
I thought I would report again on that this week with a little more time behind me in using them and some of what I have found and have enjoyed and those kinds of things.
I have been reading a lot of things that are in my news feed.
Obviously I have Apple in my news feed and it says the five things that Apple Watch can do with watchOS 27, the 20 things on the phone, this on the iPad.
So there are a lot of stories that I’ve read, and I will admit that I have not tried to use a lot of the new things in the OS 27 betas, but they happen anyway.
And one of the reasons I think I don’t use it is every day I am checking to see where I am on the Siri AI watch list and wait list.
And I look and it says, hey, you’re on the list, and now it’s been 10 days or something like that.
And I’m trying to remain patient, and I’d rather be talking about that, but I am going to talk about what I’ve seen to this point in the betas.
And the other thing that happened is my device is indexing.
I think my computers indexed fairly quickly.
My iMac at work, I think that was probably the fastest.
It’s always on power.
It’s always on.
And so I think that one finished quick, although it’s not as easy to tell.
When you get on your iPhone or your iPad and you go to settings, it says right there, it’s indexing.
You can use your device as you normally would if you wanted to index faster, do longer charging periods.
So I was doing that.
And finally this week, both my iPad and my iPhone finished their indexing.
And I think what that means is that the search is better for those devices in general, not so much because of what the new Apple Intelligence is offering through the assistant, but just in general as well.
So looking at the betas, they have been very stable.
There are some weird things that happen.
That’s true with every single beta that comes out.
I have not been doing any kind of feedback to Apple because I’m not a developer.
And so I was kind of waiting until the public beta comes out and I’ll still run the developer beta.
But I think once the public beta is out, then I can provide feedback because some of the things that are happening today may not happen when the public beta comes out.
And that says it’s coming out in July.
I was reading some things this week that talked about maybe a second developer beta coming out Monday or Tuesday this week.
But again, that’s me.
Not sure I care that much.
I really want to get on the smarter, more updated series.
So a couple of things that I’ve run into.
The good things are good, and I’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute.
But there have been some weird issues with CarPlay, and it’s only happened once.
But when I plug my phone in, it’s almost like I get the dynamic island on my screen, but there’s nothing in it.
And it’s just like a pill-shaped black box that just stays there.
And it’s really weird.
It happened one time, and it happened, you know, I got in my car in the afternoon to go pick up my wife and daughter from the airport, and it was on there.
I unplugged my phone and plugged it back in.
It’s on there.
I go to Queen Creek and have dinner with my son.
And so we’re there, and I get back in my car, plug my phone in, and it’s there.
And then the next morning, it’s gone.
And then the next afternoon, it’s gone, and then so on and so forth.
And I haven’t seen it again.
So that’s kind of weird.
iPhone mirroring I use quite a bit.
And so there was some things that I had read that Apple had made that better, and I think it might have been a little bit quicker to connect.
I didn’t see a lot of differences.
But at one point, instead of showing my entire screen, it just changed into a little square box instead of the tall rectangle, and I could not run my phone at all.
So that was kind of weird.
There’s been some general lockups.
CarPlay says, okay, I’ll give you directions to this place, and then the map never does anything.
A couple of springboard reboots, I think is what you call it, and those kind of things.
But in general, pretty solid.
I haven’t played a lot with trying to figure out exactly what is new, again, because I’m waiting for the big what is new so I can play with that and talk about it.
There are a few things that just happen.
One I’d actually turned on, and that’s Workout Buddy.
I know some people don’t like it, and up until the 27 betas, you had to have your phone if you wanted your watch to use Workout Buddy and talk to you.
So that has changed, and so I did turn that on the first day that I went for my outdoor walk.
It would beep as if it was going to say something, and then nothing would happen.
So that was kind of strange, but that was only that first morning walk.
Ever since then, it beeps and talks to me and says things about my walk and those kind of things.
The one oddity is that my GPS has been super consistent, and it was super consistent before, but now it’s super consistent, and my mile is longer than it was with the latest iOS 26.
So in a three-mile walk, I’m losing about a tenth of a mile from what I used to do.
So that’s kind of weird.
I don’t know what’s going on there, but it is super consistent.
It records my mile right at the same exact spot on the road every single time, and my two-mile and my three-mile and my four-mile when I walk on Saturdays, then my five-mile.
So that’s been really consistent, just not where it was with iOS 26.
Not sure why that happens, but it is fun to have that workout buddy.
Some people think it just doesn’t matter, but I like it.
The Apple Card has made some small changes, and it’s supposed to be easier to get to when you pay for things.
I’ve always had it as my default card, so I haven’t seen that big of a difference.
But the one thing that is pretty cool now is my wife and I share an Apple Card, and so when either one of us spends money, the other person obviously knows about it.
But now it gives me a notice of what level of cashback that purchase is available for.
So it’ll say it’s available for cashback, and that means the minimum.
But if it’s available for more, like the 2% or the 3%, then it will tell me that as well.
And then it gives me a map of where the purchase was made, and that’s pretty cool because my wife was traveling in this time frame, and so I could see that she was spending money in Buffalo in any other times where we were together if we had seen that or maybe if we weren’t together.
But having that map is pretty cool.
It’s not so much that we can keep track of where each other are.
We already do that with Find My Friends, but the fact that we can see where the card was used so we can see if something weird happened, like, hey, we don’t go there, we don’t live there, whatever that may be.
The other thing that’s changed is replies and messages.
It gives you full strings of text, and it looks at the conversation, and so that’s been kind of interesting.
Sometimes I tap it accidentally and it sends a message or something, but it’s been pretty neat to see that.
And then another thing that I noticed is, so my wife was on travel.
I mean, she was traveling to Buffalo to visit her sister, and so she sent me on her way home.
She said, right now it looks like we’re going to get there at about 3.30, and their little button popped up underneath that message that says, do you want to add this to your calendar?
And then the next text she sent was her flight number.
She didn’t type flight number.
She didn’t do anything like that.
She just typed the flight number, and obviously the iPhone recognized that it was a flight number, and it gave me a little button under there to track the flight, and it would just open up in a subwindow in the message app and show me where the plane was, and that worked everywhere.
It was pretty cool.
So I’ve seen a few things like that.
I don’t know if the phone is any quicker.
Battery life hasn’t been that terrible either, and I haven’t really searched out, like I said, some of the other changes that have been made, and I probably should.
But in the meantime, I sit here impatiently waiting to get off the wait list and see how the new Siri reacts, and I’ve read a lot of articles about it.
People are pretty impressed with it, but I haven’t been able to try it.
As soon as I do, you can know for sure that I will report it here and tell you what my thoughts are on what Apple has done to this point.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at marigfamily.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,
