Meeting reports added
I’ve updated the front page of the Strait Macintosh User Group website, adding links to meeting reports that date back to June 2018. A few meetings are missing, either because there was no video recording, or no one took notes, or both. As an example: June 2025. Not only did no one take notes, but I also failed to turn on closed captioning or record video. I may write up my notes in time.
According to the index located at the bottom of the Useful Things page,
the site has 535,489 words of text, 310 media objects, and over 150 pages (counting both “pages” and “posts” as pages), as of this writing.
Preference settings
This is mostly of historical interest: “Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984-2004,”
https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference
is a very well-done display of the various ways in which Apple has displayed user preference settings in the Mac operating system over a 20-year span.
AppleCare One
Apple now lets you bundle AppleCare policies for a number of devices into a single plan. You can read the details on Apple’s site, though they could have picked a better URL:
This article tells you how to add or remove devices from the plan:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/122224
Blood oxygen and Apple Watch
Several years ago, Apple added the ability to monitor blood oxygen levels on the Apple Watch. A patent troll (i.e., a law firm that specializes in making money by suing companies for alleged patent violations) sued Apple and won a contentious and somewhat dubious judgment that required Apple to stop selling watches with the blood oxygen feature. If you already had a watch with the feature, that was fine, but after a certain date, Apple Watches were no longer sold with this feature.
Apple has reworked its software and, with iPhone iOS 18.6.1 and Apple Watch 11.6.1, it has enabled a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature. If you have an Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, or Watch Ultra 2, you can get blood oxygen readings. Details here:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/08/an-update-on-blood-oxygen-for-apple-watch-in-the-us
New operating systems next month
New releases of the Macintosh, iPhone, iPad, Watch, Vision Pro, and other device software should be released. Apple is changing its software to a uniform naming convention, with everything being branded by a year. Thus, expect macOS 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, etc. In a break with tradition, no new hardware has been announced, though rumor sites have suggested there may be new models of iPhones.
Many thanks, Lawrence, for your time and expertise in sharing these topics that are definitely of interest and very informative.