This is Technology Bytes, episode 179 for August 9th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I want to talk about Beta 5, the next version of the beta developer beta that will be coming to all of our devices in the year 27 release.
That’s maybe not the number 27 release, not necessarily the year because it’s going to release in 26.
I know, kind of confusing.
But when you live on the beta train, you are always looking for the next release because little things are broken in your devices, and you find ways to work through them and work around them and get your devices to perform at a level that is acceptable.
But you’re always waiting for that next thing, hoping nothing else breaks and that something gets better, at least for your own devices, and I’m sure everyone is like that.
But the thing is that we live on a schedule, and we think Apple’s going to release on some schedule, often based on what they’ve done in past years with the developer betas.
And most often those are solid schedules that come true within a day, but most often within hours.
And so this week everyone is expecting—this past week, yeah—everyone was expecting Beta 5 to be released, and at the end of the week people are like, What’s wrong with Apple?
How come Beta 5’s not out?
What’s broken?
What are they doing?
What, you know, what is going on?
In today’s world of software development.
And I don’t live in that world, so I’m kind of speaking out of turn, maybe.
But you wonder about the speed.
You start hearing people talking about vibe coding and these kind of things.
In other tech podcasts I listen to, they talk about the, like, Patch Tuesday for Microsoft, and the last Tuesday they came out with, like, over 500 patches.
And there’s, like, bug bounties that all of these big tech companies have, and some of them, Apple included, have had to slow those things down because people are using AI to find all these little bugs.
And so it’s just a question of, okay, you’re finding errors faster.
Can you make fixes faster?
What’s the speed that we should expect?
What does the development cycle look like in today’s world?
And, you know, I don’t know the answer to that.
But I was thinking if there’s some speed to errors and there’s some speed to fixes, and there are some people thinking in this environment today, in the test environments that we can build with AI, that software bugs could become a thing of the past.
But so then it raises questions.
Why is, in our opinion, because Apple has made no promises, why is beta 5 so delayed?
Again, Apple has made no promises, so is it really delayed?
Well, come Monday the 10th, it will have been two weeks since Apple released a beta.
And at this time in the developer beta cycle, they’re generally releasing a new version every week leading up to September when the new iPhone releases and they officially release the software as— Fully developed, understanding that there’s still stuff to follow after that and, you know, Siri AI is in beta, you know, whatever you want to look at.
But it still makes one wonder what the schedule looks like and what is happening.
And, you know, Apple doesn’t have to tell us anything.
They don’t need to share their schedule with us.
They’ve never shared the schedule with developers as to when things are coming, except for at WWDC where they say the first developer beta, and usually it’s available that day for people to start using and testing their software against and those kinds of things.
But for the rest of us who like to live on the edge and just want the next beta, hoping that it fixes little things that they see are wrong.
And it’s kind of interesting because this beta has been super stable, and I haven’t even written anything in the feedback program to get Apple to fix anything because most often I am waiting for the next beta and it fixes those things.
Sometimes in the past I’ve made write-ups of things that are going wrong on my devices, and almost as often the response I get from Apple, if I get any at all, is that should all go away in the next beta release.
And so unless it’s really glaring, then I often don’t write anything.
And if I’m using the beta, maybe that’s the wrong approach.
I think they want that feedback, but I assume they’re getting it from developers, of which I am not.
So it’ll be interesting to see.
I fully expect that the next beta, beta 5 of all the 27 OSs, will come out on Monday, but there’s nothing that guarantees that.
It’s just looking at the past and foretelling the future based on what Apple has done previously.
On the selfish side, I want it to come out.
I’m also really curious to see, when it does, if there’s anything more in the story than just, yeah, here’s the next beta.
Like, we really worked on this, or this is what’s happened.
And, you know, there are things in the new artificial intelligence that they’ve built into Siri that I don’t understand, like it can’t access my health data.
I thought that was the whole point of the system being able to access everything on your phone.
And so I don’t know why that restriction is there.
It can’t open files and document things, like it can’t open pages, it can’t open numbers, those kinds of things.
I spoke about that before, and I don’t know if any of that’s going to change coming into this new beta.
But because of who I am, and once I jump on that train, I am always impatient for the next stop to come.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes@merigfamily.com.
That’s M-E-A-R-I-G family dot 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.
