Author: Duncan Pike

Asus Republic of Gamers has just announced its new ROG Flow Z13 for South Africa, for the deep-pocketed gamers who don’t want to sacrifice too much power for portability. This 2-in-1 gaming tablet receives the latest and greatest mobile SoC from AMD and offers a 180Hz ‘2.5K’ touchscreen display, a large 70Wh battery, and enough ports for all your peripherals. And it comes with a Stylus for all the doodlers out there. Take the ROG Flow Z13 with you everywhere The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (yes, that’s its real name) is supposedly one of the most performant mobile SoCs…

Eskom halts load shedding (again) Much of the country groaned when Eskom announced on Friday that Stage 3 load shedding had returned for the weekend. At the time, the country’s power utility expected the power cuts to last until the morning of Monday, 10 March (today) as a result of the sudden loss of 2,700MW of generating capacity (thanks Kusile). Luckily for, well, everyone, Eskom managed to recover enough generating capacity come Sunday, 9 March by successfully bringing Kusile back online. “Coal operations at Kusile Power Station are at optimal levels. All units that were offline as of Friday are…

If you have fun plans for this weekend, you’ll have to have your fun in the dark. Eskom has just announced the return of Stage 3 load shedding from 14h00 today, Friday 7 March. The beleaguered state-owned power utility ‘anticipates’ Stage 3 to last until 05h00 on Monday, 10 March. Time to get those backup power stations out again. Wherefore art thou, electricity? #PowerAlert1 Eskom implements Stage 3 loadshedding from 14:00 today and anticipates to be in this mode until Monday at 05:00, following 98% availability of power supply, due to loss of 2700MW over the past 14 hours. To…

It’s been a busy week for Apple. The Fruit Company’s recently updated Mac Studio follows updates to the iPad Air and MacBook Air. Except here, raw performance is the main focus. This time, that performance comes in two possible flavours – M4 Max and M3 Ultra. As is customary, Apple says that the M3 Ultra is the “highest-performing chip it has ever created.” Until the next one comes along, anyway. Size continues not to matter The exterior of the ‘new’ Mac Studio has no discernable changes. There’s no new Sky Blue colourway, and the I/O options and layout are visually…

It was only a few months ago in January that we said the first Wi-Fi-connected earbuds would probably launch before the end of the year at the latest, but likely sooner. Xiaomi announced its Buds 5 Pro alongside the Xiaomi 15 Ultra in China on Thursday, 27 February. Unsurprisingly, the latter stole the limelight with its impressive camera tech. But since visiting Xiaomi’s rather large MWC booth this week in Barcelona, we know that the Buds 5 Pro are also launching in Europe, so there’s a small glimmer of hope they might make their way to South Africa, although we’re…

It turns out that ‘something’ was a new iPad Air. When Tim Cook teased ‘something’s in the air’ earlier this week, most of the industry waited for his Fruit Company to announce new M4-powered MacBook Air models. It seemed like all signs were pointing in that direction, considering usually-correct Apple psychic Mark Gurman said so and the M3 MacBook Air launched around this time last year. Clearing the Air Well, Apple just proved it’s still got a trick or two up its sleeve and threw everyone a curveball by announcing the ‘new’ iPad Air. We say ‘new’ because it doesn’t…

During the Honor Alpha Plan keynote address at MWC in Barcelona, Spain, the company’s chief marketing officer, Dr Ray Guo, announced a slate of new devices coming to market soon. Four new devices were announced, namely the MagicBook Pro 14 laptop, Pad V9, Watch 5 Ultra, and Earbuds Open. Plenty to see It seems Honor is positioning the MagicBook Pro 14 to be its most performant 14in laptop, sticking either an Intel Core Ultra 5 225H or Intel Core Ultra 9 285H chipset inside and giving it an 80W high-performance mode. Combine that with either 16GB, 24GB, or 32GB of…

A little under three weeks ago, a high-ranking Apple employee leaked that the company would be launching the iPhone 16e. True to their word, we got it a week later. Now, the same employee has once again leaked the company’s next product launch, and we have every reason to believe them again. In both cases, the mentioned employee was the company’s CEO Tim ‘Big Apple’ Cook. He was right about the iPhone 16e launch, so it’s astronomically likely that he’ll retain his clean record. But what could the world’s largest Fruit Company launch next? There’s something in the air (and it’s…

Honor has revealed its ‘Alpha Plan’, the company’s new corporate strategy, at a launch event as part of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The new direction for Honor essentially amounts to its transition from a smartphone maker into an “AI device ecosystem company”. At least, that’s how Honor’s new CEO James Li tells it. “It is clear that the AI revolution will reshape the paradigm of the device industry – completely transforming our productivity, our society, and even our culture more than ever before,” said Li. Along with the new strategy and logo (pictured below), Honor announced it would…

It seems Meta isn’t happy with only having its AI chatbot baked into all of its existing apps. That’s much harder to monetise and limits its AI reach to people who use those apps. While that number is likely in the billions, that isn’t stopping The Zuck™ from launching his own standalone Meta AI app to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, according to a recent CNBC report. Speaking to ‘people familiar with the matter’, CNBC reports that Meta plans to launch the AI app sometime in Q2 of this year (between April and June). This probably doesn’t have anything…