Soundbyte 374 – April 2026

ChristopherNews, SoundByte

Apple 50th Anniversary Concert in London

Welcome to SoundByte – In this issue

April Meeting – 50 Years of Apple!

Join LMUG, on Monday April 13 at 7pm BST to celebrate 50 years of Apple Computer (April 1, 1976). What better way to celebrate than to share our own stories of how we came to the Mac. Your committee members will go first and please bring your own stories. What was your first Mac and how did you get it? Are you still using it, or are you watching us on a iPad? What’s your story?

Check the email this newsletter came in for the link to the Zoom meeting. You can also find the link in our Slack Meetings Channel. 

We’re not stopping there however. Apple has marked the occasion by holding musical celebrations around the world. I’m not sure how anyone was meant to catch these, I suspect it was serendipity to be in the right Apple Store at the right time.

Also in London, a Fitness + trainer expressed his appreciation by cycling around in not quite a circle – if you see what I mean .

Tim Cook meanwhile published a letter celebrating progress, invention and craziness; and gave an interview to his favourite Good Morning Amer….oh no, Sunday Morning with Jane Pauley:

Then we couldn’t let such an anniversary pass without a new book: “Apple at 50“. And this one is a whopper at over 600 pages. But apparently with unprecedented access to people inside the mothership, long time Apple writer David Pogue has produced a detailed history of Apple to great acclaim. And a crazy song to go with it.

Speaking of History, that song was performed at the end of a remarkable reunion of Apple alumni, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California. The museum has some rare Apple prototypes on show at the moment and you can watch the discussion they hosted below with lots of previously unknown facts about how Apple got here. The one that suprised me the most was that no-one in Apple expected the iPhone to become the hit it became. Hindsight is a wonderful thing eh?

And in the spirit of the old Macs, here’s an easter egg on Instragram – how that start up bong was created.

Hear me now! AirPods Max 2

Just a speck bump, but the AirPods Max 2 gains new software features from its new H2 chip. This includes better noise cancellation, higher fidelity and some AI features like live language translation. The price stays eye-watering at £549 – is it worth it?

Truly the Mac for the rest of us

It starts with one simple word: Hello. Hello greets every new owner of a MacBook Neo when they come to unwrap it. Almost every Apple product starts with a Hello, but Apple has made a point of this with the Neo experience. It puts me in mind of two other products where Apple made this point loud and clear: the 1999 iMac and the original Mac from 1984.

sources: theapplehub; apple insider and cartadise

The Mac, iMac and MacBook Neo each represent ‘computers for the rest of us’ that did and will likely bend the consumer PC market. Each bent the market in different ways:

  • The Mac brought desktop computing to the computer market, sweeping aside the command prompt. Unfortunately for the original Mac, most of that sweeping was done by Microsoft with its poor copycat Windows OS (very poor until Microsoft ripped-off NeXT’s User Interface in Windows 95)
  • The iMac radically simplified internet computing and influenced the whole appliance industry with its translucent design creating a radical contrast against dull beige PC boxes. That first iMac had a huge impact on Apple, saving it from bankruptcy and setting its design direction for several years.

The MacBook Neo is radical in a new way: price – £599. Think about this: The original Mac in today’s money would be around £5,400. The iMac in today’s money would be around £2,000. Last month I explained how Apple achieved £599 (3.3-10x cheaper!). A number of different things came together. The advance of Apple Silicon so that an iPhone system-on-a-chip was powerful enough to run macOS alongside powerful apps (and the A18 was designed for Apple Intelligence/AI). The progress in recycling, so the case could be made from other Apple products’ waste aluminium. Advancements in high resolution screens, so that cheaper variants could meet Apple standards.

So how does this bend the market? Similar to the original iMac the problem (for PC makers) is when you compare it to the competition. Other budget laptops at the MacBook Neo’s price tend to be made from dull grey plastic, with slow processors, lower resolution screens (if physically bigger) and worse webcams and speakers.

Something else I think that has been missed is the market opportunity opened to Apple by, of all companies, Microsoft. This is the painful forced migration of Windows users from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Around half of Windows devices are made redundant by the switch, with the guillotine falling hard this autumn. Half! When those users are forced to upgrade they are probably going to need a cheap PC option and ‘hello!‘.

So it looks good, is it actually good? Many of the online reviews have been a bit misleading. The reviewers tested it using the tools they knew, high-end professional video editing software. Many of them glossed over regular computing or compared it with the twice as expensive MacBook Air. But if we think about who this is primarily for (normal people on a budget), the fact that it can run the high-end software at all, means it will be amazing for anyone doing writing, social media, watching videos, web browsing with tabs, online shopping, revision, research… It will run rings around budget laptops.

And there’s more. Reviewers have been shocked to discover that the MacBook Neo is actually the most repairable MacBook in years. It prompted the ex-Apple(!) founder behind the hyper-repairable Framework (Windows/Linux) laptops to make a comparison. The Neo actually gets a little respect here.

Consequent to this, some users have started modding their MacBook Neo, adding various hacks to try to speed it up, just like when we had Macs of old e.g:

It’s not all golden for Apple though. There is one important area of the PC market where PCs have the edge and many will happily spend more for a specialist PC desktop. PC gaming is a huge and growing market for which game performance and games library size is the only comparison that will matter:

This isn’t to say that games won’t work on the Neo, it will just be slower than PC games played on their native platform (Windows). But when it isn’t PC games, the Neo has some (bad karma?) console gamer tricks up its sleeve. And Windows switchers can have their cake and eat it for occasional niche Windows apps. I do wonder if this will be the future consumer divide – specialist Gamer PCs and Macs for everyone else?

Is there any evidence yet of market bending? Let’s ask Apple’s CEO, maybe some early indications!

Closing the Gap – M5 Pro and Max

Gaming isn’t the only area where the Mac is behind. The Mac is also behind in 3D computer generated imaging. Both of these (niches) involve software tools that are designed and optimised on Windows. Brute power may be needed to overcome this disadvantage and Apple has released its latest salvoes with the latest M5 PRO and M5 MAX powered MacBook Pros. These are laptops with power and airflow compromises, but we can see Apple creeping up to the latest top-end PC laptop graphics cards and beating it in some areas.

For everything else, the latest processors includes the usual neural engine improvements and then some more, with each graphics core including AI as well a new design.

Where is all this power going? As indicated the main use case seems to be AI workloads. AI everywhere and all at once. AI accelerated professional workflows and tools. If you have the super-high and specialist workflow that will benefit from this, you will want these M5 MacBook Pros. Everyone else using their Mac for work will do very well now with the M5 MacBook Air, which is also more powerful than ever, and the MacBook Neo is now here, for the rest of us.

How much RAM do you need?

What a contrast, 8GB of RAM in the MacBook Neo, yet it is able to do light video and photo editing in professional software, and these new MacBook Pros, which top out at 128GB for top end commercial work! When buying your own laptop (in particular, the MacBook Air) – how much RAM do you need?

The answer is not as much as you might imagine. The same macOS optimisations that enable the MacBook Neo to sip RAM applies even more effectively to the Air. How does this work? Have a look below.

The perfect monitor?

Reviews are in for the new Studio Display XDR. It’s twice as expensive as the regular Studio Display, and without the bells and whistles of the XDR, the regular Studio Display faces stiff competition from cheaper alternatives. So it might be XDR or bust if you want the best. What’s it like? Have a look:

25 amazing years of OSX

Mac OS X 10.0 (“Cheetah”) was released on March 24, 2001, that’s 25 years ago. What a ride! I remember being in Paris, on a homage with LMUG when the public beta was released in 2000. It was a technical marvel, a vision of the future and unusable on my G3 PowerBook. It was clearly designed for future Macs with faster graphics, bigger screens and higher resolution.

I went back to Mac OS9 and it wasn’t until 10.2 Jaguar that I switched back, with 10.3 Panther and the associated future Macs sealing the deal.

A few years later came Mac OS Tiger, the first macOS released for Intel chips (skip to 21:53 in the video below) and we saw many switchers coming over, some under the iPod halo effect or drawn in by the best web cafes in the world (Apple Stores).

Transition has been a feature of the Mac experience. 68k to PowerPC to Intel to Apple Silicon/ARM, three successes made possible by genius Apple engineers.

The whole period after the debut of the iPhone has seen a slow motion merger of features, moving in both directions between macOS, iOS and iPadOS. Close brothers. Could we ever have imagined OS X running on a phone; then running on a watch? Could the original Unix developers have imagined it?

The death of Mac Pro

It was in the tea leaves when Apple replaced the Pro Display XDR with the Studio Display XDR. Was Apple saying that the old model was meant to accompany the Mac Pro and the Studio Display is for the Mac Studio? Simply put, yes. The Mac Pro, introduced in 2006, has retired 20 years later in 2026.

But Mac Pro and PowerMac before that was just a brand name. What did it stand for? For one it was expandability and also performance, the best performance money could buy. The cold reality is that the expandability of Macs today are bound by the functions and features of the Apple Silicon chips. These are system-on-a-single-chip machines.

Luckily Apple Silicon is not simply a powerhouse, it’s also highly specialised with hardware acceleration for video, graphics and machine learning – obviating the need for many expansion cards. At the same time, in 2026, we have Thunderbolt 5, which can deliver PCIe4 speeds…the same speed as the internal PCI cards in the late Mac Pro. This means if you need other specialist cards (extra storage, video capture, audio processing etc). You can re-build your own solution with a Mac Studio which has 4 Thunderbolt 5 ports. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

The dawn of AI Agents

We are on the cusp of a new computing age. Or a redux of what we’ve seen before. The more I see, the less I am sure. What has come in 2026 is AI Agents. We have had the AI chatbot revolution: when you ask a question and you get an answer (that may or may not be accurate). Now we go to the next level. With the AI Agent, we say what we want and then AI figures out on its own how to do it. The AI does all the necessary steps, figuring it out and then delivers the work, even reaching out and updating your files if asked to.

This is meant to transform productivity (which I hope means more production, rather than the billionaire wet dream of mass job cuts). I mean we want that Star Trek future right? Not Bladerunner.

But…we say what we want? This is the part that gives me pause. What do we want, and can we explain it? Is it going to be easy or is it going to be like Automator and Shortcuts which are meant to be easy for regular people to use, but actually is quite hard or opaque to figure out. It’s not just how to set them up, but it is actually a skill to be able to explain what you want, as well as how to compose your queries.

The big deal at the moment is something called Claude Co-work, which appears to me, to have similar…barriers, despite having much wider capabilities.

This video left me feeling this was somewhat out of reach for normal people, even before you expand it.

And the additional game changer, to expand it, is called OpenClaw, which feels to me even more technically focused. I can barely explain what’s in the video below and I think it is exemplified in the news that Mac minis are being purchased specifically to run it – and note this warning here on LMUG’s Facebook Group if you are interested in joining in with…Crab-Lobster? 🦀🦞🤯

This is all so far over my head! 😩 Steve Jobs said “you only use what you understand“. This was in relation to Safari’s simplified bookmarking features. This feels so true about this new technology.

Perhaps Agentic AI tools are ripe for Apple to transform and simplify this year with the promised new ‘personalised’ Siri. We’ll have to wait and see how, and what AI advancements come in WWDC this June.

The significance of Shannon Airport

And now for something completely different to end this month’s Soundbyte. There is a link to Apple, as this presents the origin story of the special zones in China were most of Apple’s products are made. Here is remarkable the story of Shannon Airport: