Apple released two smaller updates on Monday evening: iOS 26.5.1 is aimed at owners of an iPhone Air or a model from the iPhone 17 series, macOS Tahoe 26.5.1 addresses a stability bug on Macs with an M5 chip. Both updates appear a few weeks after the extensive versions 26.5 for iOS and macOS, which, among other things, introduced end-to-end encryption for RCS messages.
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The point releases do not provide any new features – they focus exclusively on bug fixes. According to Apple’s release notes, iOS 26.5.1 is only available for the iPhone Air and all iPhone 17 models, including the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max. The macOS update, however, is offered to all Macs with Tahoe support, although the documented fix only affects M5 hardware – an indication of possible further, unspecified fixes.
Wired charging blocked when the battery is almost empty
The iPhone update fixes a bug that has been documented since the end of April. Apple describes the problem in the release notes as follows: The update fixes an issue in which wired charging on iPhone Air and iPhone 17 models could not work for a small number of users when the battery was almost empty. In everyday life, this could result in an almost discharged device not starting again despite the cable being connected.
According to Apple’s release notes, macOS Tahoe 26.5.1 fixes an issue where Macs with the M5 chip could shut down unexpectedly in enterprise environments. The cause was the combination of certain network extensions for content filtering and the M5 chip – a common scenario in managed IT environments with mobile device management. Noteworthy: macOS 26.5 was supposed to fix a similar crash bug on M5 devices, but the problem apparently continued to occur in enterprise configurations.
(mki)
