Soundbyte 376 – June 2026

ChristopherEvents, Keynote, News, SoundByte

Apple WWDC 2026

Welcome to Soundbyte in this issue:

Next Meeting – WWDC 2026

Join LMUG next Monday, June 8 after Apple’s WWDC keynote presentation for our monthly meeting. Join us in Zoom from 5.45PM before the event starts and you can watch the keynote in another window from 6pm UK time. Switch back to Zoom after the keynote and we will discuss what happened. Watch at apple.com/uk, or the Apple YouTube channel.

We will review the new products announced at WWDC, their impact and if we’re buying any of it. Come with your questions and we’ll try to answer them.

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. 

You can now follow the London Mac User Group on Bluesky! Come and say hello 👋 over there 👉🏾 https://bsky.app/profile/lmug.bsky.social. Read more about it here.

AGM 2026

Join LMUG a week after WWDC on June 15 for our Annual General Meeting. This one is for members-only who will have received a link to the meeting in an email last month (May 21st). We will review the year, take your suggestions and elect a new committee!

Your input and participation are vital to the success of LMUG. We will start the evening with our usual Newsbyte presentation, where you can get up-to-date on the latest in the world of Apple and Technology.

If you would like to be get involved or would like to hear more about that the committee does, we would love to hear from you!

You can always contact us at [email protected] to find out more.

We are excited to see all of you at the meeting and look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas. Let us come together to help set LMUG’s future direction.

Award winning apps

Apple Design Awards

Each year before WWDC, Apple picks the best new apps of the year (from their perspective) in the Apple Design Awards. Have a look to see if you find anything interesting to you.

When robots think for themselves

2026 is the year of AI agents and if Apple delivers what they promised, we’ll be hearing about it at WWDC. Let wait to see what Apple calls this technology. But how powerful are agents really and how far can they go? Too far? See for yourself what happened when Hannah Fry set one loose:

Your next glasses?

Smart glasses are still likely to be the next smart gadget. Meta appear to be in the lead, Google is snapping and Apple is…watching all this very early generation tech get…tested:

So that’s Meta as the big fish in a small pool. What’s new? Google showed off their latest glasses recently. But don’t get excited – these prototypes are still months away. Doesn’t hurt to look though?

The limits of honest design

Sir Jony Ive, famously believed in each element of his designs, being true to themselves. I owned Sir Jony’s first shipping Apple Product, the Apple Newton 120. He redesigned the dowdy Newton slab subtly, but the result was transformational. You held it and the lid could flip over just like a note pad, and the stylus clicked open with magical tactile sensations like a retractable click pen. An absolute delight…until you turned it on!

And now we see that philosophy applied to the electric car. Unfortunately not just any car, but a Ferrari. We saw the amazing interior back in March, now we see the exterior..and the reaction to this has been dire! I think the first marketing error was producing it in the same colour as the new Nissan Leaf, inviting instant comparisons. And the comparisons are valid, they do look alike! How can that be?

In the video below, if you listen carefully it is explained, and for those hating the design, the truth hurts. The reason why they look similar, is aerodynamics. Aerodynamics trumps all other considerations, like racy sports car curves, which lets be honest, mostly exist to cover-up the space needed for a mid-engined V8 or V12 engine. Superfluous on the Luce. And all the electric sport cars that ape their petrol predecessors aren’t really design innovations are they?

Why is aerodynamics so important? It’s because although battery technology has jumped leaps and bounds, it is still a constraint on design. And if you’re going to make the design true to itself (a’la Sir Jony), the electric car wants to be a tear drop slicing through the air with flat sides, a flat bottom and and a clean swoop over the top. Consequently all the delightful, sexy, tactile design goes on inside rather than outside. Sorry petrol heads.

Let’s be real though. The Ferrari is around £500,000. You’re not buying it anyway, right? Better to wave the flag and buy the one built here in the UK:

Nvidia joins the chat

Nvidia is joining the post-Intel PC fray with a new chip design, clearly inspired by Apple Silicon. Coming later this year (no proper benchmarks yet), the RTX Spark will go into super high-end desktop PCs, and mass-market Ultrabooks, which is the PC equivalent of a MacBook Pro…

What’s interesting in these chips are:

  1. The graphics performance, since that’s Nvidia’s speciality on the desktop. The one thing that smokes Apple Silicon are Nvidia’s full size graphics cards. Let’s see how much of that power survives the cut down for Ultrabook thermals.
  2. The AI potential. Nvidia’s chips and technology run many of the AI data centres around the world. How will that translate to PCs?

Nvidia enters the ARM-based PC market when the water has already been warmed up by Microsoft and Qualcomm over several years. ARM Windows 11 is several revisions in and works great on my Mac mini under virtualisation. But let’s not get excited/fearful until we see the actual devices independently tested, not least for battery life. Here is Nvidia’s intro video and vision for their new chips:

MacBook Neo a hit

MacBook Neo is the most popular new Mac. Maybe this isn’t surprising, but also not surprising is that this threat to the PC market hasn’t gone unnoticed. We now have the first real competitors. To my surprise these aren’t ARM laptops, but ones using Intel’s Panther lake technology (albeit a cut down Core Series 3 version). Expect them to try to out-compete Apple with specs. We shall see if that’s enough to overcome the desirability of colourful Neos and the distaste of Windows. Here’s the (best?) one from Dell.

Beat the heat?

Those of us in the UK experienced some tropical heat in late May. It was a preview of what could be a very hot summer #climate. UK buildings are famously built to keep in the heat for winter (unless poorly insulated). At the same time, we don’t get enough heat to justify air-conditioning in most homes. Instead we rely on fans to alleviate our discomfort. But now there’s a product that sits in the middle, an ultrasonic evaporative cooler that leaves nothing damp! This Turbocool, cooling fan (desk or tower variants), with smartphone controls, looks genuinely new and for some of us, it has come just in time:

Once you have dealt with the heat, consider what comes after: damp and dingy autumn. Again in the UK many houses lack mechanical ventilation systems to tackle this. Instead most rely on opening the windows. If that’s you, how about a smart Birdie to tells you when to ventilate by dropping dead?

Birdie 2.0 in action

Yup, read about it on the Verge!