SoundByte 367 – September 2025

ChristopherNews, SoundByte

Apple Event

Welcome to Soundbyte! In this issue:

September Meeting – Live Keynote

It’s September so it’s time for our annual Live Keynote session where per clockwork we are expecting Apple to unveil new iPhones. This is not a rumour rag so there will be no speculation here. Instead Join us next Tuesday September 9 to watch and then discuss afterwards.

Yes you read that right. This month’s meeting will happen next Tuesday from 6pm, not Monday, to coincide with the Apple Event.

We recommend watching on our own devices from 6pm and convening in Zoom at 7:30PM BST.

We will be discussing all the announcements, the prices, the features and the flaws if they are apparent. It’s you who makes these evenings special however, so please feel welcome to share your opinions, especially if you intend to buy something that was announced!

Car Play’s Ultra-slow adoption

Launched in 2022, just one Aston Martin has integrated Apple’s next generation Car Play system. Car Play Ultra extends Car Play from entertainment to cover all the car’s screens from speed to ventilation. It appears to be a wonderful system, but we now learn of only the second car to adopt it. This one could be significant, a small electric car with long range. According to Top Gear it will be unveiled later this month. Let’s hope this indicates the easing of whatever has dragged down Car Play Ultra and we see more of its stylish displays and simple controls improving new cars, next year.

How do AirPods work?

AirPods, bizarrely are Apple’s best foothold so far into the future of augmented reality. They are great headphones, but combined with Apple Watch or iPhone they isolate us carefully from the world and overlay it with clear music, travel directions or soon, work out exhortations! But how do these AirPods actually work? Is there anything special about them? Have a look at this Real Engineering video below to learn a lot more!

Older Macs ejected ahead of macOS 26

Tick tock, time has run out for some of the oldest supported MacBooks. We are talking with reverence about Intel Macs from 2015-17. In particular MacBook Air and Pro. It’s not quite rest in peace, and limited support may remain available. Check the details on MacRumors.

Warning about password managers

Disaster! Serious flaws have been found in some password managers. Maybe bad enough to cause some to fly over to Apple’s Password App? Or think twice!

  • The first action is to change your passwords, especially any old ones that you have used frequently in the past and [shock!] you might still be using today [ED: why are you looking at me?!].
  • The second action is to make sure you have checked and applied the latest software updates for any password managers or password Web browser extensions you are using. Don’t delay!

But now, have a look at the below video to see the details of this dire situation.

Whole House WiFi – how?

You editor has just been through the pain of figuring out how to get a strong WiFi signal in his office. The problem was, I have switched to ultra fast broadband, but not the regular kind. The UK has been rolling out something called fibre to the premises for several years now. This is extending ultra fast fibre optic cables from the cabinet at the end of your street into your house. For many this means getting internet around 10 times faster (250Mbps from 25Mbps) for a similar price. Game changing.

However, when I looked for when this was coming to my area, I would see ‘no plans’. I realised this was because my street already has Virgin Cable Broadband offering ultra fast speeds. But I’ve had Virgin in the past and, for reasons, I did not want to go back.

Instead what happened was a 5G tower was erected outside my kitchen window a few months ago. It was there because the housing estate down the road had objected it away. Well I have yet to find a chip in my head or suffer any unexplained illnesses or whatever the current conspiracy theory is. Instead I discovered the 5G tower was erected by Three and they were offering 5G wireless broadband at a competitive price.

Usually the price of ultra-fast broadband is tiered, with the entry price around £25/250Mbps and then higher pricing up to 1Gbps. But 5G speed is very dependent on range and congestion. The best Three could offer was 250Mbps. This was still 10 times faster for me and on switching, I found, due to my proximity to the tower, that I could actually receive over 1Gbps, when standing next to the router! But this was a problem.

To get any signal the 5G router had to be at the front of my house, in my kitchen window sill. My office is the opposite end of the house on the first floor. Up there none of my devices got a strong signal. I thought, easy, I’ll get a Wifi repeater, but 3 Amazon returns later, none of these worked. Why? It’s mostly because of how the data is transferred back to the main router (back haul) and the distance being too great (despite apps claiming a good signal). Whatever device I tried it was dead slow, and these little repeaters were also quite unreliable, losing the signal completely, despite what brand I chose.

In the end I’ve invested in a Wifi 6 Mesh system, with one node above my kitchen cabinets near the middle of one side of the house, and a second node outside my office above the stairs on the other side of the house. I have turned off the Wifi on the router and I run an ethernet cable from the router, above my kitchen cabinets, to the first node. My speed is still limited by not having a wire connecting the two nodes, but I’m now reliably getting over 400Mbps on my Mac mini. Game Changing! I used some of the techniques in this CNET article – have a look!

Right to repair in action

Have a look at this video which covers Apple’s self-repair system. It looks really cumbersome and I think we are lucky in the UK to be a fairly small country with relatively good access to Apple Stores, but choice and alternatives are good. Have a look at Snazzy Labs here.

Adding USB-C to old iPhones

Too long did iPhone and other devices stay on Lightning. But they made it over to USB-C eventually. The resultant mixture of cables can be annoying if you have an older iPhone with the redundant connector. A possible solution had emerged – just add USB-C to the old phone. How? Via the case. Take a look below at a clever solution from this Swiss inventor and we’ll see you next week to see what new phones get unveiled!