Martyn

The really annoying thing about Apple..

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.. is that while they support Thunderbolt 3/4/5 and USB4 – they don’t bloody support USB 3.2 gen 2, 2×2 which is what the majority of external SSD drives on the market support. The result of this lack of support (which is an optional component of USB4) is that external drives are going to be far more limited than the speeds that the manufacturers advertise.

The PC market (e.g. most modern Windows PCs) don’t have this problem. It is incredibly frustrating that Apple have chosen to go down this route to the extent that you are forced to pay their over inflated prices when it comes to internal storage. There are a number of drives (Thunderbolt 3) which overcome some of the limitations, and Thunderbolt 5 drives are slowly making their way – but these are still few and far between – and EXPENSIVE.

iOS 26: Pretty, pretty, pretty good

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Alongside macOS 26 Tahoe, I decided to take the risk and install iOS 26 Developer Beta 1 on my iPhone 16 Pro Max. It generally works well, and the big feature that works right out of the box that I love to bits is call screening.

When activated, call screening answers any incoming calls and prompts the caller to leave their name and the reason for calling. Assuming it’s not an autodialler and somebody actually does leave their name/reason for calling, it’ll then start ringing the iPhone whilst displaying a transcription of what the caller has just said. You can then choose to pick up the call or send it to voicemail (where it’ll also be transcribed).

I’ve bemoaned for YEARS that the iPhone’s greatest weakness was that as a phone, it just wasn’t as good as its Android counterparts when it came to handling nuisance calls. But now that Apple has implemented call screening and on-hold waiting (e.g., it listens for on-hold music so that you can put the phone down and do other things – once it detects the other end is talking, the phone will notify you), it has fulfilled its duties in the one thing it should have done all along. This is especially true in the telecoms sector, which is so far behind in combating scam, phishing, and other nuisance calls.