"These are formidable new weapons in the smartphone anti-spyware arsenal"

Davey's memory isn't what it used to be, nor is the iPhone's - and the latter is a very good thing, thanks to the addition of EMTE

- DAVEY WINDER

I transitioned from a fully Microsoft and Google ecosystem to a mostly Apple one a few years ago. I say mostly as I maintain both a Windows laptop and an Android phone, but neither is what I’d call a daily driver. So it should come as no great surprise that, like so many Apple aficionados, I looked forward to the annual updating of my iPhone.

This year, however, it wasn’t the orange colourway – and you should know that I really love orange – or the battery life, or even the new camera improvements that got me tech-horny. And no, it certainly wasn’t the AI stuff. What was it, then, that made me trade in my perfectly functional iPhone 16 Pro Max? I present to you the acronym at the heart of my upgrade decision, and which should weigh heavily on yours: EMTE.

What the heck is EMTE?

To understand what EMTE is, we first have to explore MIE, which isn’t, I’m sad to report, the latest movie starring Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt. MIE is, in fact, short for Memory Integrity Enforcement, while EMTE is the acronym for the Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension.

Both of them are formidable new weapons in the smartphone anti-spyware arsenal.

Although it wasn’t on the radar at the Apple event that launched the iPhone 17 series, MIE is actually a big deal if you ask me, or anyone who actually gives a flying expletive about security. As part of the iOS 26 update, MIE, according to the Apple Security Engineering and Architecture team, is not only an advance in memory corruption vulnerability protection, but also “the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems”.