Happy New Year and welcome to Soundbyte!

In this issue:

• January Meeting
• Who wants a robot?
• Electric tipping point?
• Bigger smaller better cars?
• Let’s go agAIn?
• We asked for glasses, do we want them?
• Protect yourself from unwanted intrusions
• Not shocked but not yet caught up

January Meeting

Join LMUG, tomorrow night, Monday, January 12 at 7pm GMT for a post-Christmas get together to discuss what tech gifts we received this Christmas and share tips from our devices.

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

Who wants a robot?

I decided to give this edition of Soundbyte a theme. Is 2026 going to be an inflection year of big changes? Some of the announcements below might change everything, for better or worse. But they are also contested. Some might say we were here last year with the all dud AI devices. There’s more of that this year, but maybe improved with a year of lessons learned? I think we need to wait and see, until real evidence emerges.

So let’s start with the dramatic advances in humanoid robots. From recent announcements they are ready to do human tasks with robotic hands. This could have a big impact on factory or domestic work. We’ve seen this one before. It was first a dog, then an acrobatic boxy human. Look at it now, is this a breakthrough or just hype?

Electric tipping point?

To save the planet we need to switch from fossil fuels to electricity for power. This is not controversial, what’s difficult is the practicality. Is the technology ready and is it too expensive? A key part is batteries. These have been on an upward trajectory for several years, becoming longer lasting and cheaper. But is 2026 the year where batteries get so good, they just sweep away fossil fuels naturally, by market shifts?

This one is very contested. Contested because it’s too good to be true. It’s a battery type called solid state. Solid state isn’t actually new, but until now, no-one has managed to make one ready to go-to-market. This one claims to be dramatically better, in a way that could change the world and coming this year – or its hocus-pucus. You decide.

Bigger smaller better cars?

This is perhaps on firmer ground. Of course it’s not easy to make an electric car. 10 years ago it was a new technology. Several revisions were needed to learn optimisations and we know this created the space for agile entrants like Tesla. This learning and development was evidenced, I think, by the preponderance of large electric SUVs (with space to fit the big battery needed). Early inefficiencies meant smaller EVs were often comprised by low range or tight space inside.

It’s now 2026 and it appears that the technology has developed enough for there to be a battle for great small EVs. Here’s one where the design appears optimised to maximise internal space, while having good range. Is this a breakthrough?

Let’s go agAIn?

Don’t get excited, but 2026 is the year that Apple is going to try again with Siri. Siri to me feels like that OS 7 problem in the 1990s, where Apple struggled and failed to replace it. It wasn’t that Apple didn’t have the technical skill, it was maybe confused strategy; lack of focus, a combination? Something had to change and it did when they purchased a fully working replacement called NeXT, and re-developed it into OS X.

Many think something similar needs to happen to our beloved and bedevilled Siri. You could say it already has, as Siri passes most of my queries over to ChatGPT. But that’s a weird disjointed experience. Somehow, Apple needs to make it like the first Safari on iPhone. You searched and Google gave the answer seamlessly. We don’t need to know what’s going on underneath (see NeXT and OS X), it just needs to do the personal assistant things they promised. 9-to-5 Mac collates what we know so far here.

Something that will definitely happen in 2026, with all these AI investments is a supply-side crunch. All the new AI infrastructure is scooping up memory chips on a serious scale that will cause a wide impact – read about the problem coming on the Register. On an unrelated note (or maybe not, who knows). Apple was recently happy to go on stage and talk about the cloud technologies underpinning some of their services. Fancy that, a live keynote.

We asked for glasses, do we want them?

We, I mean I looked at the Vision Pro [remember that-ED] and said nope, but could see that it pointed to a future of computing with AI glasses. We don’t know if Apple sees the same future, but their competitors do and they are racing forwards. Coming in 2026 are Google AI powered glasses. I have talked about these before and here’s what they look like now:

But wait, let’s remember how long it took to figure out that the Apple Watch was really a health, wellness, fitness and sports companion, optimised in the Apple Watch Ultra. What are glasses for – travel navigation, translation and action cams? But if you don’t wear glasses, do you want to wear smart glasses? Or will these replace sunglasses and be useful only in summer? Or do we want to wear glasses for work to replace your monitor? And do Spatial OSes make monitors obsolete for productivity software? Where are the spatial computing apps?

Much to work out, but already the 2026 breakthrough glasses have been unveiled. To howls of consternation and contestation. Justified perhaps. Here is the announcement that sparked the ire.

Protect yourself from unwanted intrusions

If you have children (and it’s not limited to children), you can’t be unaware of the dystopian outcomes made possible by hitherto unregulated AI. Parents have some local controls already, and here’s some healthy alternatives to social media, but 2026 could be the year the hammer comes down. Last year we saw unfiltered dangerous and nonsense headlines being generated by Apple of all places! We learned the term AI Slop with countless nonsense videos being generated [many with racist and sexist tropes-ED].

In 2026 it’s getting personal and much worse. Social Media is already banned from children in Australia due to the mental health damage these AI driven tools cause. France could be next, with pressure in the UK to follow suit. Now some AI are undressing people without their consent! If companies are unable or unwilling to control their AI, they could be banned outright.

All this is happening in a more dangerous world where personal rights and privacy protections are less certain in more places. You might be walking freely and find yourself in the middle of some kind of raid or protest. 🤷 Suddenly the authorities want access to your iPhone, but how to ⛔️ “no, thank you!”, while appearing to comply like Luthen Rael in Andor? 😇 Have a look at this YouTube Short for instructions. [ED – do we really need this now? 🙁]

Not shocked but not yet caught up

5 years later, The PC industry is now fully over the Future Shock of 2020, which up-ended the assumption of Intel dominance and introduced powerful and conquering ARM chips. In 2026 we will see new, much more powerful ARM chips from Qualcomm in PC Laptops. These will be great laptops – lower power, but performant. But still a generation behind. Apple has not dropped the ball once in the last 5 years and the newest M5 chip stays ahead. Have a look over the garden fence at what’s coming:

How are we getting this amazing performance from our devices? It down to miniaturisation and concentration of processing within computer chips, but at a scale that’s hard to fathom. Here are two videos that try to show what’s happening deep down:

and specifically with the new M5 chip.

And with that please have our best wishes from LMUG for 2026!