Author: Duncan Pike

South Africa’s largest retailer, Shoprite Group, is planning to commit a further R3.5 billion towards reducing its carbon footprint. It’s not using its own money of course. That would be silly. Instead, banks and other companies are giving it money so they too can feel good about themselves. Sounds like a win-win, right? That’s billion, with a ‘b’ All those bags of money are coming from Standard Bank, RMB, and an unnamed beneficiary. The split amounts to R2 billion, R700 million, and R800 million respectively. That’s rather a lot of money. The Shoprite Group is going to use it to…

Netflix ads might not show up everywhere It’s no secret that Netflix plans to release an ad-supported tier on its platform. Over the last several months we’ve heard that the streamer has partnered with Microsoft to handle ads on its platform initially, the ad-supported tier will be missing some content and won’t support offline downloads.But, according to a new report from Bloomberg, some content will be safe from ads – kid’s shows and new original movies. Aside from the fact that advertising to kids is scummy, some of the studios that licence kids’ shows to Netflix will not allow the…

Samsung did it, Xiaomi did it, and now Huawei has done it. By ‘it’ we mean launching a new foldable device (among other things). The Huawei Mate Xs 2, Matebook X Pro, and MatePad 10.4 are some of the brand spanking new devices from the Chinese tech giant. They were unveiled at the Xperience Huawei 2022 launch event on 18 August 2022 at Sandton in Johannesburg. This time, the new foldable and all of its friends will be available in South Africa. Brought into the fold(ables) The star of the show was the Huawei Mate Xs 2. Technically this is…

Mark Gurman, the seemingly always-informed Apple whisperer, says Apple is planning to hold its next launch event on 7 September. Two guesses as to what that’s for. If you guessed an iPhone 14 launch then well done. One gold star for you. This is according to Gurman’s sources, “people with knowledge on the matter”. So our previous guess wasn’t too far off. He’s usually spot on when it comes to the goings-on at Apple so we don’t have any reason to doubt him. It also helps that Apple is a company of habit. It almost always holds iPhone events in…

We don’t think the folks at Spotify have had much sleep over the last few months with all the updates it has pushed out. The latest addition to the music and podcast streaming app focuses more on the latter of those two. Specifically, recording podcasts yourself. You might not yet be aware that Spotify is crazy about podcasts. If that’s the case, welcome to Earth. The company wants to make recording podcasts easy for everyone. Although, it seems like it’s using the word ‘podcast’ loosely here. Can you pull that up, Jamie? Back in June, the company started testing in-app…

After a recent spate of updates to the platform and interface, Spotify is looking to grow subscriber numbers with a good old sale. If you’re a first-time subscriber you can start your Spotify Premium subscription off with three free months. New Duo and family subscriptions only get one free month. Unfortunately, the offer is only available to new subscribers (including students) so if you’ve cancelled your subscription previously and are looking to cash in, you’re out of luck. Unless you cancelled Spotify before 15 July 2022. Then you still have a foot in the door for a discount. You can…

BMW and Toyota partner up to develop fuel cell cars Image: BMW BMW and Toyota’s long-term partnership will soon result in the pair’s first jointly-produced hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The plan is to launch them as soon as 2025. BMW already has a hydrogen-powered X5 concept in the pipeline with plans to start small-scale production this year. This isn’t the first time the pair have teamed up. You might’ve heard of the BMW Z4 or the Toyota Supra. The German-Japanese partnership developed both. BMW and Toyota are exploring another renewable energy source, as more manufacturers pivot towards electric vehicles.The main…

Nvidia, last week, announced its Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE). This comprises “a collection of cloud-based AI models and services for developers to easily build, customize, and deploy engaging and interactive avatars.” It’s essentially a character creator for chatbots of the future. Remind us, how is this a good thing? Well, there are some excellent aspects to this. Mostly, the ones that don’t involve inserting digital avatars into your life unnecessarily. A startup could use Nvidia’s Omniverse ACE to create a sign language interpreter as an overlay for YouTube videos. Because Nvidia’s tech is cloud-based, the startup doesn’t need to…

A day after Samsung lifted the veil on its new folding flagship, the Galaxy Z Fold 4, Xiaomi announced its next foldable, the Xiaomi Mix Fold 2, at a launch event in China. This device looks like a considerable upgrade over the Mi Mix Fold from last year. It also looks like Xiaomi is playing the one-up game with Samsung in a few notable areas. For one, the Mix Fold 2 is several millimetres longer and wider than the Galaxy Z Fold 4. It’s nearly a millimetre thinner when unfolded and only measures 11.2mm thick when folded. That make’s it…

Here at Stuff, we get loads of cool tech to review. Sometimes it’s exciting and new. Sometimes it’s entirely novel. Often it’s functional and gets the job done. The Acer Veriton Z All-in-one (AIO) PC is one of the latter. But does it check the necessary boxes for those looking to populate a small to medium-sized business or who want a home office PC? Acer sent us one so we could find out. The point of putting it all together If AIO PCs are foreign to you, you can think of them like an iMac. The PC bits are all…