eXtensions - Monday 5 January 2026
By Graham K. Rogers
With the new year, and Q1 2026 expected this month, there are heightened rumors about what Apple will do next, the apparent failure of Vision Pro, and some recycled hit pieces on Tim Cook. I am not sure of the cause (probably personal memory) but another Time Machine disk let me down. Not a major setback; I have redundant disks. I bought a replacement Kingston SSD. With spare time over the holiday, I moved hundreds of image files from a backup disk to an archive.
As expected, there has been continuing speculation about some of the products Apple may release in 2026. Along the way some of the pundits highlight what they consider as some of the less successful areas and many appear to be looking forward to a foldable phone from Apple: an idea I detest. I see Samsung has announced a triple-fold phone. Like AI, these experts insist that it is an area that Apple must enter or be doomed. Apple has been doomed ever since it was a two-man operation run out of a Cupertino garage, although it has come close once or twice. Bear in mind that Apple will be releasing its Q1 2026 figures closer to the end of the month. Analysts always like to put pressure on Cupertino to force down the share prices before the event. Expect a couple of negative stories from Bloomberg and from Ming-Chi Kuo (see below). We may expect more of these rumors as the year has now begun in earnest.
A number of articles have appeared suggesting that the Vision Pro is a disaster. At the price Apple is asking, it was never expected to have high sales. Some of the articles note that the company manufacturing the device has now stopped. They do not, however, mention that production of the new M5 Vision Pro has been shifted to Vietnam. However, Wesley Hilliard (AppleInsider) who, tongue-in-cheek perhaps, is described as a "Rumor Expert", does include this in his analysis. He looks at the numbers, the shift in manufacturing of the revised M5 version to Vietnam, and the purpose behind its development, noting that some of the features are beginning to appear on the devices of other headset makers. This is not uncommon. We remember the iMac-like all-in-one devices that began to appear a while back; and the iPhone (itself bringing together a number of existing technologies into one package) saw a major restructuring of the handset market.
Of all devices that have helped Apple grow, the iPhone is central. However, reporting that there will be no iPhone 18 this year is bound to put a dent in the enthusiasm (and the share price), even if - after reading to paragraph 3, past an advertisement and a full-width image - we are told that the Pro version will not be delayed Oliver Haslam. This Redmond Pie report links back to a Hartley Charlton article on MacRumors the day before, and reading that, their source is another MacRumors article. That article by Tim Hardwick is dated 5 May 202. It cites Ming-Chi Kuo as the source of the rumor.
If I have this right, in January 2026, the rumors floating around now were first aired in May 2025 and are from a pundit with a known history for several misleading rumors about Apple based on limited supply chain information out of East Asia. These rumors often appear just before the Quarterly results and I usually take them with a large pinch of salt until they are confirmed by Apple.
Two negative pieces on Tim Cook come from MacDaily News. One citing the above iPhone rumor, and including its usual negativity on Cook. The other is just a rehash of those negative views. I am not going to provide a link for these: just the same recycled opinions that this source has been putting out ever since Cook was appointed to the CEO position. I note the writer presumptively tells us what Steve Jobs was really thinking. There is no support for this. Under Cook, who was Jobs' choice, Apple has expanded to be a multi-trillion dollar corporation. On the way, some decisions have been made that not everyone likes.
I am not happy (still) that Aperture [photo-editing and workflow software] has gone. I still have the install DVD. I would like Apple to release a new Airport wifi router; and I have questions about features (added and missing) in the recent OS 26 updates. I am not alone there. However, with minor exceptions over the years I have been able to carry on with few failures: the Macs being particularly reliable. Since the arrival of Apple silicon, they have been a delight to use, but of course, one could argue that this was another idea that came before Cook. It might be useful to also factor in the management of resources that Cook has maintained.
This is definitely something I would not want to test out, but Jowi Morales (Tom's Hardware) reports on a MacBook Air that had a shrapnel hit and still works, despite a hole in the screen. The K key is also damaged. I needed a new screen on my last Intel MacBook Pro when I transported it after forgetting to remove a paperclip, so I am quite impressed by this. The replacement screen took a couple of weeks to fix, but I picked up a basic MacBook Air at a local outlet and was delighted by that too. It was hard to let it go when the MacBook Pro returned. I did keep it as a spare for a few months, but it was redundant and I was able to help a friend who had a computer disaster.
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My new year holiday period started with an apparent disk failure. One of my Time Machine backup disks asked for the password when I connected it to the Mac, but when that was entered, the disk failed to mount. I tried several times (and other passwords), restarting the computer at one stage, but although I was asked to enter the password again on the restart, the disk failed to appear on the desktop. Two cheers for redundancy. With three backup disks - two of these rotated between home and my office so I always have a recent backup offsite - I was not unduly worried. I was a little annoyed perhaps, but I will try the disk after the holiday in the Mac mini at work, and see if this can be resurrected. I reached for another disk, plugged that in and the morning Time Machine backup was done. Just to make sure, I connected another disk and backed that up too.
It is good to be paranoid about backing up. I learned a hard lesson when my 12" G4 PowerBook was stolen in a burglary some years back. I had some 1700 photographs on the disk then and lost them all. Now I have over 60,000 in two libraries, on three disks with the most recent 30,000 saved in iCloud, backed up with Time machine, with original (DSLR and film scans) on external backup media. Disks are not permanent: the medium will deteriorate over time, they may be damaged, stolen or otherwise become unavailable. A backup disk of a backup is good insurance: two backups are better. When I ask students about backing up, they usually laugh, although some have lost computers, have experienced hard disks crashing, and other problems. The lesson, when it comes, is a hard one to learn.
While not urgent, I decided to look for a suitable replacement disk on new year's eve. I thought a hard disk in the range of maybe 2 to 4 Terabytes would work for my purposes, although these seemed pretty thin on the ground in the local mall I went to. Staff attention was pretty thin too. I looked at three or four shops and almost picked one Western Digital 2 TB disc of the same type that had just failed. These had served well in the past and I still have a couple. When I went to the checkout, I saw that the discs had the USB type A port, which may give an indication how advanced some users are, sticking to tried and tested older systems.
In another shop, there were a couple of discs which looked interesting, but I am wary of those that use encryption, particularly as Time Machine has its own system. I noticed a Kingston SSD advertising Read/Write speeds of 1000 MB per second. This was interesting. A closer look at the shelves saw a similar disc but with 2000 MB/sec read/write speeds. I decided that I would have that. It included a generation 3.2 USB-C cable which would suffice for backup purposes with the M1 MacBook Pro, although in practice I am using a Thunderbolt 4 cable. This disk was 5999 baht although it took a little nudge to get the cashier's attention before I was able to pay. As well as the disc and the cable in the box was a neat little rubber enclosure, which will protect the disc. It was soft enough to just squeeze it apart and slide the disc in. I connected the disk to the Mac and gave it the necessary permission to open the desk. In disk utility, I was not able to partition the disc, but instead erased it and set it up as macOS extended with the master boot record. That only took a few seconds. In System Settings I added it to the list of backup disks and went for lunch while the first backup took its course.
I now have two disks that no longer work because the Mac does not recognize the passwords I entered. I do not know if that is a problem with the password (the Mac or my memory) or the disks, but redundancy has prevented any disaster. They could not be accessed on the Mac at the office. Nor was it possible to see them on a PC, although that might be because they are formatted macOS (journaled). One of them could be heard spinning. I asked a technician if he could try and force a re-partition so perhaps I may regain the use, but I am not hopeful. [As I left the building I had a message to say they had been fixed.]
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On New Year's Day, after photographing a couple of avian visitors I was in a mood for some tidying up and decided to transfer last year's images on a backup disk onto an archival disk (backup to the backup). I have another at the office, but I will deal with that later.
The 5 TB archive disk also doubles as one of my Time Machine disks with two partitions. I still have 1.49 TB left on the archive partition so that will be enough for a while. A Time Machine backup started as soon as I connected the disk, but as I had already backed up on this disk earlier, it indicated the backup would only be 4 minutes. I had forgotten that if I also transfer files while Time Machine is running, speeds are reduced. By the time the first backup of images was done - from August 2024 to the end of that year (15.17 GB; 167 images) - the TM backup had extended to almost 50 minutes. As the 2025 folder held 552 scanned images (TIFF files, each around 66MB), I decided to be patient and wait for TM to do its thing. With the 2024 file transfer complete, the time came down fairly quickly.
I unmounted the TM partition, which is what I had intended initially, leaving the Data partition on the desktop. As there were over 300 2024 files and 616 2025 files from the Nikon D850 to transfer, each around 65 MB, plus another 550 Hasselblad scans to go (and output from a couple of other film cameras), this was going to take longer than I had anticipated.
However, when I dropped the 2025 folder onto the archive disk, those 550 files (54.13 GB) were shown to have an expected transfer time of 12 minutes. As I had been looking through the archive disk to see which files were already there, I dropped this into the Nikon D850 folder in error. I would fix that when the files had been moved. It took only a second. The 280 or so Nikon images from 2024 (the RAW images are larger than the TIFF scans) took just over 15 minutes; and I went off to prepare lunch. The final part of Stranger Things did interrupt the task, but I finished the transfers soon after the defeat of Vecna with 616 images taken on the Hasselblad in 2025 (42.95 GB) in 11 minutes.
Stranger Things has been one of the most unusual TV series I have ever seen. It broke many rules, in terms of believability and fact, but those who watched it had to totally suspend disbelief. One of its strengths is that so many people were quite happy to accept the whole concept. I am sure that this is due in part to the strength of the earliest episodes in Series 1 and 2, with the excellent real world locations that allowed the fantasy to build on that. The gaps between the different series may also have heightened expectations, with the two pauses in the final series extending that. Figures for the Finale, which became available here at 8am new year's day, show that over 1 million saw this in cinemas, while 34.5 million viewed the series online (not the Finale itself), which is the highest ever on Netflix.
Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. After 3 years writing a column in the Life supplement, he is now no longer associated with the Bangkok Post. He can be followed on X (@extensions_th). The RSS feed for the articles is http://www.extensions.in.th/ext_link.xml - copy and paste into your feed reader. No AI was used in writing this item.
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