eXtensions - Friday 26 December 2025
By Graham K. Rogers
This week a couple of items of Apple history resurfaced: different, but each with its own significance. I continue to be frustrated with charging on my Apple Watch 11. Phishing attempts are more clever, but still miss some points making discovery possible. The end of Pluribus Series 1 was something of a shock: my lips are sealed. Other good movies and series are available here. A rumored Peaky Blinders movie is on the way, as is Christopher Nolan's, The Odyssey.
This is the last item planned for 2025, so I wish everyone well for the future. The year that is about to pass has seen many ups and downs and I fear we are in a far less stable environment than we have been since the mi-1980s. The worlds of technology has also seen some changes, particularly with the growth of AI. Wall Street loves it, and that seems to have accelerated the uptake in other areas, not least of all with academic writing, where some figures, who really should know better, see AI as some sort of savior. Daily I see output that would appear to prove the opposite, yet still these word salads are encouraged.
Last time, following a report on a new storage medium, I looked at some of the ways, external storage had developed, from floppy disks up to SSDs. By coincidence, this week, Luke Dormehl writes in one of the Cult of Mac historical articles, how Steve Wozniak and Randy Wiggington (a high school student at the time) built a prototype of the 5.25" disk drive for the Apple II - apparently highly profitable hardware.
A message I spotted on X this week by user Grey carried a link to a presentation by Steve Jobs at the International Design Conference in Aspen, that took place in 1983. The first 20 or so minutes involved a presentation, with a number of digressions, followed by a Q & A session. Although it is not possible to hear most of the questions, their direction is fairly clear by the answers he gives. In the questions and the presentation, he is unusually prescient, with an understanding of where technology is headed in the near and distant future (then). He also breaks down some of the technology ideas so that the audience is able to follow easily. This contrasts with the short presentation of Eric Schmidt at the iPhone release. What he said was chockfull of future insights, but it took me a couple of listens to understand. The video of Steve Jobs in Aspen is some 54 minutes and is well worth spending time on. If the video reports a configuration issue, click on the arrow and that should open in YouTube.
I was asked by Apple to complete a survey this week on my recent purchase of an Apple Watch. For the first time, my dissatisfaction levels were high. I made a comment about the charging. This is nothing like what I have been used to up to now. I am concerned that the charge levels drop faster than any Watch I have had before, coupled with the confusing charging. Whoever designed this part of the software (I presume it is not hardware) seems to have an 80% fixation. When I have pressed the button for "Charge to full", with a charge above 80%, it has dropped on occasion to below that figure, then I have to press "Charge to Full Now" again, when I finally find out that it is sitting there unfinished.
On Friday afternoon I went home early and did some work, then had a rest on the bed. The Watch showed 76%. Some 2 hours later, I checked the watch, and saw that it was also taking a nap with the "hook" feature on the green display ring displayed and 80% charge shown. 2 hours to charge 4% seems unrealistic to me; and if a user has left the watch on a charger for that length of time, what is preventing it from completing the charge? I had to press the button for "Full Charge Now" and wait some 30 minutes more for it to do the logical thing: charge the watch. It was the same the following afternoon (Saturday): put on charge with a level in the mid-70s (%), yet a little over 2 hours later it had only reached 80% and I had to waste more time waiting for it to play catch-up.
The next morning, I put it on charge at 0554 with a reading of 84%. By 0616 it was at 99% and a few minutes later, fully charged. That was what I wanted, of course, but I have had to change my charging patterns (used with several versions of the Watch before) and have upped my monitoring of the device when it is on charge: are we there yet; are we there yet. The Apple Watch 11 itself has never let me down and it does charge (eventually - usually with my intervention), but I am unable to find any settings that would allow me to change the way it (or some writer of code at Apple) has decided how I must change my behavior, when the Watch is supposed to be my assistant.
I may want to look at the time so raise my wrist, but sometimes I am shown two or three of the widgets, including a small watch face; frequently the heart rate interface appears without my pressing the complication for this app. This does not always show the beating heart: sometimes other displays appear like the Range or the Resting Rate without any (conscious) intervention by me. No other Watch (or watchOS) has had me this frustrated, particularly as, with the charging, I can find no way to turn off this partial charge feature that I never asked for.
|
|
|
The recent OS26 updates have left several users making adjustments, or wondering about lost features. I reported a while back on the user complaints regarding the interface for exercise on the Watch. I still have to wait sometimes while it displays the arrow I want, then changes to another, before coming back to the original. On the iPhone, several users have reported features that are no longer available for Portraits in Photos. I was annoyed to have lost the filters in RAW images (I like to view a scene in black and white). These are still available for HEIC images, but that is not what I want, or what I had before. Does anyone at Apple think about how users want their devices to work (or consider options) before making arbitrary interface changes?
Having written that, let me make it clear that the iPhone 17 Pro does still take excellent photographs.
The rice field across the road
Following reports of other attack attempts on Mac users, made with normal-looking requests, I had email, purportedly from Apple on Saturday morning, which I was able to identify as Phishing immediately, by the salutation, "Dear electrical engineering" and the mention of an iCloud account. Not me dears. There was also a strange little icon on the left side of the message, marked OBJ. The email has been sent to the Phishing email at Apple - reportphishing@apple.com. Another one appeared late this week, but this time addressed to "Dear Electrical Engineering".
A later analysis on the Mac of the coding showed me other dubious text entries, but I had already made up my mind that this was a risk, not that I would click on a link in email, even if the message does appear to come from Apple. I sent a message for the attention of others who are linked to the Electrical Engineering department, but no one had any knowledge, or used such an account. It was probably another almost-clever attempt to make me do something that would lead to an insecure Mac.
I also had a phishing attempt that purported to come from the Faculty IT department this week. All in Thai. The translation told me my password had been not been changed for over 150 days (an odd, arbitrary number), and that my account would be blocked (attempt to induce panic), if I did not press the button (oh yeah?) and that I must change my password by 2pm. As the university, not the Faculty run the email accounts, this was an immediate no-no. A look at the code showed several red flags, and it appeared that the original sender was one of the government ministries in Bangkok. At work I mentioned this and was told that, Yes, this was "Spam", although I regard it as an example of phishing.
Apple is rumored to be bringing some 20 new products to market next year, including affordable Apple Glasses. I am not sure at the moment if I would want anything like that, but I do have my own basic Wish List for 2026:
I am still running the last version of the Airport router. It performs faultlessly, but it only operates on the IEEE 802.11n standard. We have gone way past that and the current standard is 802.11be or WiFi 7 (802.11bn - WiFi 8 - is to be announced). I did buy a WiFi 6 router, but that did not perform as well as I wanted: speeds were OK, but the security was questionable, and despite help from the service desk, I was never able to change the password from its default. I disconnected it, and for the second time in its life, reconnected the Airport router, which was online and working faultlessly within a minute or so.
There have been rumors about a new AppleTV next year. This was supposed to be available in 2025. I might consider that if it ever appears. The one I am using dates back to pre 4K times. Like the Airport, it never misses a beat, although updating is always slow. That may be a feature of the range, like the glacial updating of every Apple Watch I have had.
I have always declined to make any new year predictions. That is a mug's game: so easy for a self-elected expert to be wrong.
I had had the Netflix movie, Train Dreams in my watch list for a week or two. One reason was the small, yet significant role William H. Macy played: always a good bet when he is in something. The other was a comment from Jeremy Gray on PetaPixel who reported on the film effects used for the movie, "making it look like beautiful old photos". He writes, "Although shot on modern Arri Alexa 35 cameras, the film employs a 3:2 aspect ratio, is almost entirely lit with natural light, and has an exceptionally filmic, beautiful appearance." The article also spends some time discussing the unusual vintage lenses that were used to enhance the effects. I finally watched it just before Xmas and was glad I did. Train Dreams followed the fairly unremarkable life of a man from early childhood through to his death, noting his layered observations and realizations: a series of small, but beautiful snapshots.
During the movie I found that the silences conveyed as much to me as the words uttered. One other note about the filming concerns the way they filmed the trees: "If this tree was a person, how would we shoot this scene?" I found this more acceptable than the recent comments of Jason Clinton (and Anthropic executive) reported in an article on the way a chatbot was inserted into a discussion group, against the wishes of users: he refers to Clawd (the version of Claude) as "He" as the actions and feelings of the chatbot are described.
For those who like Peaky Blinders, Nadeem Badash (Guardian) reports that the long-rumored movie is to appear early next year: Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. This is slated for release in cinemas on 20 March, and on Netflix, 26 March 2026. The article includes a teaser video, and some additional news about the series. The BBC is to develop two episodes of a new generation of Peaky Blinders gang members, set around the early 1950s.
Apple brought forward the final episode of Series 1 of Pluribus. I watched this on Christmas Eve. I am not going to reveal the ending and I hope nobody else does. Watch it yourselves. Needless to say I will be looking forward to Series 2.
Earlier this month, Pesala Bandara (Petapixel) reported that an extended trailer for the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie, The Odyssey, filmed in iMax, was to be shown "ahead of 70mm IMAX presentations of Sinners and One Battle After Another". This week, The Guardian reports that the first trailer for the epic, which stars Matt Damon, has been made available. The movie is slated for release in July 2026 and other stars include Ann Hathaway (wife of Odysseus) and Tom Holland (his son), Robert Pattinson (whom I saw recently in the hilarious sci-fi movie, Mickey 17), and Charlize Theron (Circe). If the video reports a configuration issue, click on the arrow and that should open in YouTube.
Part of the attraction of The Odyssey (the original), which tells of the 10-year journey of Odysseus back home after the destruction of Troy, is the way the hero and his crew wander around the Mediterranean bumping into all manner of characters on the way. Many of the locations are probably fictional. Like all the best Greek stories, the original has a messy ending: Odysseus was away so long, his wife thought he was dead, so was forced to deal with with a mix of characters who are after her hand (and presumably, Ithaca). It is not known right now which of the stories or locations are used by Nolan in the movie.
Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. After 3 years writing a column in the Life supplement, he is now no longer associated with the Bangkok Post. He can be followed on X (@extensions_th). The RSS feed for the articles is http://www.extensions.in.th/ext_link.xml - copy and paste into your feed reader. No AI was used in writing this item.
For further information, e-mail to
Back to
eXtensions
Back to
Home Page