Apple services go rotten for a few hours
If you thought there might be something wrong with one or more Apple services or features over the long weekend, you would’ve been right. Turns out quite a few of the tech company’s services went down for as much as three hours on Monday, 21 March 2022 at around 19h00 SAST. Some of those services were iMessage, the App Store, Apple Aracade, iTunes, podcasts, and Apple TV+.
Apple confirmed all of this on its System Status page. Most of the issues were quickly resolved and the page now shows ‘Resolved outage’ next to the previously affected services. Apple confirmed the outage to the BBC, but did not comment on the cause of its issues. So it wasn’t just you having problems. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again. The Apple thing. You’re probably going to have problems again at some point.
Leaked OnePlus roadmap says to expect six new devices
Looks like OnePlus is seriously upping its device output game, if a leaked product roadmap is to be believed. According to GSMArena, this comes from a “usually reliable source” so you’ll need to use equal parts discretion and salt here. The leaker claims OnePlus will release six new devices in the months leading up to September. That’s far more than the company has managed in previous years. This is likely a result, whether direct or indirect, of its merger with sister company Oppo last year.
The OnePlus 10 Pro should be the next device from the Chinese company to receive an international release. While that’s not technically a new device, we still think it counts. That’s set for a release before the end of March, according to the roadmap.
That’ll be followed by the Nord CE 2 Lite in April, the Nord 2T in early May, and the Oneplus 10R before the end of May. July could see the Nord 3 become official. That could ship with the alternative name ‘Nord Pro’ in some markets. Then, what seems like a slight upgrade to the flagship range, the OnePlus 10 Ultra (or 10 Pro Plus) should be confirmed in September.
We’re very happy for OnePlus. Now if they could just start shipping their devices to SA so we didn’t have to import them, that’d be great.
Microsoft source code leaked in Lapsus$ hack
Turns out TransUnion isn’t the only one with cyber security problems last week. That might not be a surprise, but the fact that Microsoft may have had 37GB of source code leaked might be. According to Bleeping Computer, a hacker group calling itself ‘Lapsus$’ claims to have leaked source code for various Microsft projects after gaining access to the tech giant’s internal development server. This group is one of the more active groups, claiming to be responsible for other recent data breaches.
It claimed responsibility for a breach Nvidia suffered in February 2022 in which it tried to extort the company into removing the hashrate caps it placed on its LHR GPUs to make cryptocurrency mining much less profitable. A threat intelligence analyst, Tom Malka, told Bleeping Computer, “From my perspective, they keep on getting their access using corporate insiders.” That makes a lot of sense. Why waste your time trying to break in when you could just buy a key. It’s quite clear that the threat of cyber attacks isn’t going away anytime soon and if you’re still using ‘password’ or any of its derivatives as your password, you’re part of the problem.
Intel launches the first of its Arc GPUs on 30 March
We finally have a solid, official announcement date for the first of Intel’s new Alchemist GPUs – 30 March 2022. You can tune in on the company’s website to watch the live-streamed launch at 17h00 SAST but, if you’re frothing for more Intel GPU news, you’ll have to settle for a round-up of what we already know.
If you cast your mind back to the beginning of the year, some benchmark results leaked reportedly showing Intel’s flagship model, DG2-512EU, going toe-to-toe with the Nivida 3070 which sells locally for between R14,000 and R19,000. We’ve also seen what these cards might look like, courtesy of YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead. He has been pretty spot on in the past. The only thing we don’t know just yet is the price.
If Intel can bring these in at under what Nvidia is asking, we might see a little shake-up of the status quo in the desktop GPU world. Even if they aren’t that great, having more GPU makers is good for consumers. It keeps the others on their toes and pushes them to be better, or cheaper. Either way, it’s a win for us.