Author: Duncan Pike

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…

The South African branch of TransUnion, the American consumer credit reporting agency, has been hacked.  According to ITWeb, the group managed to breach the security of TransUnion and are demanding $15 million, or roughly R223 million, in Bitcoin within the next week. If not, the perpetrators are threatening to exploit or release the 4TB of confidential information of some 54 million South Africans. That includes, but is not limited to, contact info, ID numbers, banking details, and credit scores. TransUnion has confirmed the attack and in a statement to ITWeb, said, “We have received an extortion demand and it will…

Apple has revealed local pricing for its newest generation of iPhone SE and iPad Air. We also know when South Africans can lay their hands on them. Pre-orders have opened and are available from Incredible Connection, the iStore, and Digicape. When the iPhone SE and iPad Air were announced on 8 March 2022 at Apple’s ‘Peek Performance’ event, pricing started at $429 and $600 respectively. Those were (obviously) US prices. Local prices were always going to differ. Now, we know by how much. The iPhone SE (3rd-gen) 64GB goes for R9,800 and the iPad Air 64GB (WiFi only) starts at…

The inescapable tech behemoth, Google, announced the dates for its next developer conference. But, at least initially, they didn’t use words to tell everyone. Where’s the fun in that? There’s a rather complicated puzzle to solve that will let you know the dates for this year’s I/O. You can have a crack at it here. If you’d rather not, then we’ll just tell you. Can you untangle this string? https://t.co/PyiD8ZsMBQ Keep an eye on this thread for more clues. ↓ pic.twitter.com/uaMVzn4wgp — Google Developers (@googledevs) March 16, 2022 This year, Google I/O will take place on the 11th and 12th…

Xiaomi confirms it’s bringing the 12 Pro to the rest of the world. Like Xiaomi’s other flagships, the 12 Pro aims to beat out competitors with its favourable price-to-performance ratio. This will be the first Xiaomi flagship to launch globally since it dropped the ‘Mi’ branding from its smartphones last year. The device, which launched in China towards the end of last year, has a simple yet somewhat attractive design. The matte finish on the back might do well fending off fingerprints, which is always a plus. Seems Pro enough to us The 12 Pro sports a decently sized, slightly…

Microsoft has now made its DirectStorage API available to everyone. This new(ish) tech means that games, especially those that use high-res textures or sprawling open-world environments, will load much faster. The process involves taking some of the file compression and decompression tasks that the CPU usually has to deal with, and giving them to the GPU. The GPU is much better suited to handle those kinds of things anyway. That’s why bitcoin miners like them so much. DirectStorage make games go brrrr now? It’ll be some time before we see it used in games to improve load times. The SDK was…

How to watch NASA’s Spacewalk on Tuesday We normally wouldn’t consider a stream of someone doing manual labour a worthwhile use of your time. But when that stream is from NASA and the manual labour is fitting new solar panel arrays to the ISS, we’re willing to reconsider.That’s exactly what’s happening on Tuesday, 15 March 2022. NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Raja Chari will be conducting the EVA (ExtraVehicular Activity) as part of an ongoing upgrade to the ISS’s power system. They’re just installing struts and brackets for future solar panels, but again, it’s in space. This won’t be Barron’s…

Absa bank customers can now accept card payments using only their smartphones with the bank’s new Mobile Pay app. You don’t need a point-of-sale (POS) terminal or any other additional hardware. Just an NFC-enabled smartphone and a customer with a tap-to-pay bank card. Absa on tap It’s fairly easy to get. Your smartphone needs to be running Android 6.0 or higher, according to the listing on the Google Play Store. Chances are, if your phone came out in 2016 or later, you should be good. Your phone also needs to support Near Field Communication (NFC). That part is important. It’s…

Xiaomi hasn’t officially announced the 12 Ultra yet but you can’t keep secrets in the tech industry. A few battery specs have leaked thanks to famed leaker ‘Digital Chat Station’ on China’s microblogging platform, Weibo. Current rumour suggests that the Xiaomi 12 Ultra will feature a 4,900mAh battery. That isn’t particularly large as far as flagship phones go these days. But when you pair it with 120W fast charging, battery worries start to dissolve away. Winning battery combo? Has Xiaomi found the winning formula? It first introduced 120W charging to its lineup with the Mi 10 Ultra back in 2020.…

The rumours leading up to Apple’s first event of 2022 mentioned that we may see a new chip. Everyone assumed that would mean an M2 chip. But wait, says Apple. We’re not done with the first one yet. Its new M1 Ultra is an absolutely beastly piece of silicon. At its event in October last year, Apple announced its M1 Pro and Max chips. The chips offered increased performance for Apple’s newly announced MacBooks. Well, the folks in Cupertino wanted more. So they tried strapping two M1 Max chips together. Nothing blew up, so now we have the M1 Ultra.…