This is Technology Bytes, episode 188 for October 18, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
Today I want to talk about Apple Health.
Now, I’ve spoken on Apple Health before and their push into that environment, especially with the Apple Watch that I wear a lot.
And the past, I don’t know, a couple different episodes, I think, one when I talked about the watches I purchased, one when I was talking about the event that Apple held, I talked about their updates to the Apple Health app that I was looking forward to and thinking that would be good.
It’s really one of the reasons that I bought new Apple Watches.
The other day, the other podcast day, I was talking about someone who said, Don’t purchase on hope, and I was talking about the fact that I purchased my watches on hope for features that Apple would bring in the future.
One of those features was the new Apple Health app, and I have been using it for some time because it was in the betas of 27.2 beta 2, 1, 2, and 3, I think.
And I was really liking the new Health app.
I liked the insights.
I liked what it was doing.
I had not gone through some of the assessments that were available, but I had talked about wanting to do that as well.
And then along comes 27.2 beta 4 and the new Health…
App has been removed.
I don’t understand why Apple removed these features in this beta.
I don’t think I’ve read anything about why they did, or any speculation as to why they did.
I was not having any issues with the Health app.
It was not making my phone or my watches do anything strange.
It was doing, in my opinion, exactly what Apple had designed it to do.
It was providing insights.
It was taking more data.
It was really tracking health better than it had been before.
It was giving you more information.
It was giving you more details about what the measurements meant.
It all felt like it was progressing to a full-fledged part of what Apple does in the health world.
So then having it just abruptly removed, I don’t know how you do it any other way.
Is there a casual removal?
You know, I mean, when you update software and something’s gone, it feels abrupt because you’ve been using it for a number of the beta cycles.
But— Anyway, I’ve been trying to rack my brain, and I do read news articles about Apple over time, and I really haven’t seen anything.
I don’t understand what they’re doing.
They say it’s coming later in the year.
It’s always been that on their radar.
I don’t know if there’s anything to do with the release of the iPhone Duo that has anything to do with it, if the health app stuff on that phone is not working well, and so they’re just going to take it off so that people aren’t expecting it on that phone.
I really don’t know.
I don’t see any complaints.
I didn’t read anything about it causing problems with the watches or battery life or the phone or anything.
I really just read a lot of articles of people liking it, just like I did.
And so here I am, caught again by purchasing on hope.
There’s been no word about the recap or about the live listen on the Apple Watches, new Apple Watches.
There’s been the removal of the health app.
All the things that really I purchased the new Apple Watches for are now not available or have never been available or were once available and are now gone.
Seems like I may have not spent my money wisely, but it is also not the end of the year, and I’m sure I will get lots of time with these new features on my new Apple Watches in hopefully what turns out to be the very near future.
I thought I would take a couple minutes or less to go backwards a little bit on my coverage of my issues with CarPlay.
So last episode, I talked a bit about the issues I was having with CarPlay and what I thought might have happened and couldn’t really figure it out.
So the weather in Arizona where I live has started to cool, and so I didn’t know if it was temperature related or not, but my CarPlay has been working flawlessly.
One cable.
It’s the cheap— You know, Target cable, and it works in the morning like it always did.
It now works in the afternoon like it used to not.
And so I’m not sure why.
I would relate it to temperature, except the problem is that at the very same time that the temperature changed, I also got 27.2 beta 4.
So I don’t know if the new beta had anything to do with it.
I don’t know if temperature has anything to do with it.
But we will see if this continues.
At the moment, I just enjoy the fact that it works again and think that maybe sometime in the future it will fail, and I still won’t know why, and I will once again be frustrated.
So two episodes in a row ends up with Joel being frustrated by Apple products.
That seems weird and not usual, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, as my father would say when he was alive.
That is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes@merigfamily.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.
