Light Start – The cost of LG TV, 16GB HDDs, Hololens sales figs, and Square’s Avengers project
Brett Venter
LG’s newest crop of ultra-thin TVs will start at more than R110,000
If you’re lusting after LG’s newest W Series OLED TVs, those of the hyper-thin Signature lineup, then we hope you’ve been saving your pennies. The screens will start at $8,000 (R110,000) for the 65in version of the W Series while the 77in will set buyers back a whopping $20,000 (R270,000). Sure, this is American pricing and as such doesn’t have any sales tax or markup but it does give us a starting point. And that starting point is: Too rich for our blood. But we’ll gladly pay you a visit if you hook yourself up with some super-thin LG TV tech.
Seagate’s got a 16TB HDD coming — because why the heck not?
How much is too much storage? Based on years of experience (all the way back to when computers shipped with 20MB of storage) we can say that there’s no such thing as too much storage. And Seagate, it seems, agrees. Not content with launching a 10TB hard drive in 2016, the company is reportedly going to be dropping a massive 16GB desktop drive onto the market this year. They’ve got larger drives, make no mistake, but this new effort will be their largest magnetic drive to launch to date. Pricing isn’t even close to being announced but expect it to start at around R10k, at least.
Microsoft’s Hololens has sold “thousands” of units to date
The hardware that Microsoft’s augmented reality tech lives inside, the Hololens, has sold thousands of units to date according to the company’s Hololens EMEA commercial lead, Roger Walkden. In an industry that prides itself on having numbers in the millions when it comes to popular tech this seems quite low but the Hololens has only released in two versions. There was the $3,000 Developer edition and then the $5,000 (R68,000) Production version. The Hololens, for all its fancy tricks, still isn’t a consumer device so hitting numbers in the thousands means that there are thousands of people out there (who make apps and support devices in other ways) looking in to what it can do. There are more iterations of the AR hardware planned — we’re looking forward to what comes next (provided it’s cheaper, obviously).
An Avengers game by the developers behind Tomb Raider? Where do we pre-order?
The first thing that you need to do is watch the trailer above, if you haven’t already. See how it tells you almost nothing about what to expect? That’s about what we expect from a teaser but even a total lack of any concrete detail can’t dampen our enthusiasm. That’s because there’s a new Marvel Avengers game coming and it’s being made by the developers who created Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics) and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (Eidos Montreal). We’re excited for a few reasons — usually Marvel games are highly action-based, with thin stories and shoddy controls. But giving the series to teams who are used to creating full, believable worlds? It’s hard to imagine how Square Enix would be able to muck this one up. Sadly, details (and a game) are going to be a long time coming. Check back in 2018.
