Author: Brett Venter

Launching a new streaming service is hard. Doing so by taking an existing name and adding a ‘+’ is even harder. NASA’s NASA+ service, due to go live later this week, will hopefully sidestep some of the challenges experienced by other services that expect you to pay for them. That’s right. The American space agency is launching its service without asking you for money. It also won’t be dumping ads in front of your face to make up for that, either. It’ll just be free. NASA+ is the one? We launch more than rockets. This month, we launch our new…

It’s time to decide how much you really need a new M3 MacBook Pro for work. Local pricing is available and pre-orders are live. Even if you get in on the ground floor, you can expect to spend at least R37,500 for one of Apple’s latest machines. The worst part? That price won’t even get you the new Space Black colourway. Pricing for the new M3 24in iMac is also out and about. It starts at R33,800 and goes as high as R44,300. That’s less a testament to the machine’s affordability and more an indication of the lack of customisation…

One of the main things you need to be if you work in space is mentally stable. That’s at least partially the reason why HTC, sometimes purveyor of Android smartphones and maker of virtual reality hardware, is partnering up with a company called XRHealth to send VR hardware into space. XRHealth, here on terra firma, specialises in mental health (and even physical therapy) applications that are assisted by the judicious usage of virtual reality experiences. And it’s time for those experiences to be experienced off-planet. Well, in orbit, which is close enough. Enough space for HTC? There is a third…

LinkedIn, the social network for people who don’t feel like discussing anything other than work, is the newest online gathering point to reach a billion users. Microsoft made the announcement earlier this week while also saying that there’s yet more artificial intelligence in the platform’s future. But AI, that new and shiny object, isn’t easy or cheap to set up and operate so it’ll be reserved for LinkedIn Premium subscribers. Since a Premium sub will set you back at least R450/m, what Microsoft has in the pipe had better be good. Artificially LinkedIn The new AI tool, like most of…

As surely as one number follows another, Jabra was bound to release another contender in its Elite Active range. The Elite 8 Active is the direct successor to the company’s Elite 7 Active (told you). The new ‘buds keep the overall design of its immediate predecessor but have made improvements both inside and out. We’re not going to call them unkillable but Jabra goes to great lengths to punt their durability. We’ve spent a couple of weeks with these R3,500 in-ears and the brand might well make Samsung and Sony nervous with its combination of (relative) affordability, features, and audio…

The Realme C51 smartphone has just landed in South Africa and is yet another Chinese smartphone out for our lucrative (and crowded) budget smartphone market. This one starts at R4,000 and hopes to justify the expense with a substantial camera, battery, and a fair crop of other specs. Don’t be too worried if you haven’t heard much about Realme. You can think of it as a brand like Redmi or Honor (or Poco). It started life as a subdivision of Oppo but has since gone on to do its own thing (while still being owned by Oppo). This is the…

At Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ year-end event, the company took the wraps off a bunch of new processor hardware. Plus, the MacBook Pro and iMac lineup that will make use of them. Obviously, we don’t have local details for you yet but you can expect that the refreshed 14in and 16in MacBook Pros (plus one new entry-level model) and the upgraded 24in iMac to make landfall here soon. Before they arrive, it’s worth taking a look at the various models including one that you’ll almost certainly not be able to buy here. The fully-loaded 16in M3 MacBook Pro uses the M3…

Last night’s ‘Scary Fast’ Apple event took place in the dead of night here in South Africa but there was still excitement to be had. It was Halloween, after all.  Apple’s M3 processor roster made its debut, with three fresh chipsets due in very short order. As is usual with Apple, the new M3 lineup claims to be even faster than its predecessors, with the Pro and Max versions of the chips being correspondingly speedier. How speedy? Well, these are the first 3nm chips on the market, which should give you an idea of the bragging rights Apple is claiming…

It’s not exactly unexpected but X, formerly Twitter, has gone and launched a couple more subscription tiers for users to choose from. In addition to X Premium, formerly Twitter Blue, there are now two more plans — Basic and Premium+. The existence of these new pricing tiers was suspected at the beginning of the month but it was only once the service posted about it on X that it became official. As you might expect, there are some benefits to giving Elon’s company some (or more) money. Something to Twitter about? X Basic and X Premium+ are both live and you…

That was quick. The newly-announced Xiaomi 14 and 14 Pro handsets will be the first to land with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processors – which was only announced earlier this week. The handsets, revealed for the Chinese market at an event in that country, are already up for pre-order but we won’t get to see them for a while. Nor will anyone else. This is fine. But we’ll all want to at least give them a look. The Xiaomi 14 Pro is the obvious headliner, with a special titanium edition of the device being the standout but no matter…