At the first meeting of 2026, held on 9th January, we had reviewed Apple’s 2025 and talked about some of the changes in the recent operating system updates. Members also raised a number of other topics.
Apple 2025
We reviewed some of the Apple releases and events in 2025 including:
- Apple’s App Store best of 2025.
- The most downloaded apps of 2025.
- New hardware products Apple released in the year.
26.x Operating Systems Updates
Robert highlighted some of the new features in recent operating system updates including:
- Disabling the lock screen camera swipe gesture. DaveK highlighted that you can still use this gesture (if you keep it enabled) if you have changed the function of the camera button on the lock screen.
- Additional Spotlight clipboard history options on Mac.
- Edge light option when using a web cam on Mac.
- Reminder alarms (enabled via the Urgent option).
- Changes to sleep score.
Mac Rumors have articles summarising all the changes:
Mac OS Tahoe 26.2
iOS 26.2
iPadOS 26.2
Apple News
We discussed recent Apple-related news, including:
- The iPhone 17 Pro camera can’t use portrait and night modes at the same time.
- 8bitdo announces a GameBoy style controller for iPhone.
- iFixit launches an app.
- Interesting items from Steve Job’s childhood and the early years of Apple are up for auction.
Member Topics
- Liz asked about typing a non-breaking space in Pages, Ferrers advised that this can be done in all apps by pressing Option and Space on the keyboard.
- Ferrers mentioned Keyboard Maestro and Better touch tool as utilities that can be used to automate typing such as inserting a non-breaking hyphen character.
- We discussed using Open Core Legacy patcher to run macOS Tahoe on unsupported Macs. During the meeting Robert thought that this was available but has since found that it has not been not publicly released and appears to still be under development.
- DavidB mentioned using OBS for screen recording and Ferrers and Ben also mentioned their using of this powerful tool.
- DavidB recommended Chris McCausland: Seeing into the Future, available on iPlayer.
- Elliott pointed out that Apple make several streaming radio channels including Apple Music 1 available free in the Music app and TuneIn radio (and probably other streaming radio apps).
- DavidB mentioned that he’s still seeing a very high battery capacity on his iPhone after 2 years and recommended reducing the charging limit in settings. If you require full battery capacity, Ben pointed out that the optimised charging feature helps reduce battery wear.
- Ben discussed his experiences with Apple Watch 11 and mentioned using the Walkie-Talkie feature on Apple Watch.
- DaveK talked about and demostrated the Core Image filters (on that page click the filter name to see example images) that Apple make available to developers to include in their apps to process images.
- DaveK mentioned the Monkey selfie copyright dispute.