Author: Brett Venter

If you’ve ever wanted to own a MacBook but aren’t keen on paying Apple’s usual prices, you could be in luck. A new report from Bloomberg (via Reuters) claims that the premium tech maker is considering a budget MacBook for launch sometime in the first half of 2026. Concrete details are sparse, but the unannounced device is supposed to tempt customers away from Chromebooks and entry-level Windows machines. That’s a tall ask if you’re charging Apple’s usual prices — the cheapest MacBook currently in South Africa starts at R22,500 — but if the company could bring its prices down? MacBook?…

Google has some interesting plans for the future of AI. The company describes its Project Suncatcher as a “moonshot,” and for once, the term is appropriate. Suncatcher envisions “equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space.” The idea isn’t a new one, with one startup already investigating moon-based data centres. Reach for the Suncatcher Google has the funds to pull something like this off, however. The company reckons that Starlink-style constellations with Google TPUs, powered by sunlight and orbiting the planet, “would have tremendous potential for scale, and also…

Following an iOS-only (and invite-only) launch, OpenAI’s Sora video generation app has made its way to Android devices. Don’t get too excited yet. The launch is confined to a specific geographic location, and South Africa isn’t one of those. Sora, which recently added the option to pay for extra video generations, is available on Google’s mobile OS in Canada, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the US, and Vietnam, according to a post from the platform’s official X account. You probably don’t live in any of those places. Sora for you If you check out the official Play Store download page, you’ll…

Sam Altman’s OpenAI seems to believe that the company is worth, in its current or near-current state, a trillion dollars. At least, that’s what the company aims to achieve when it goes public at an undetermined point in the near future. Whether you believe anything that comes out of Altman’s mouth (or those connected to him in a Human Centipede-like manner) is between you and your stockbroker. Last week, reports did the rounds that the ChatGPT maker would head to the stock market for an Initial Public Offering (IPO), with the frankly insane target of a $1 trillion valuation. That’s…

The rise of smart glasses has been a trickle, starting in earnest from Meta’s Ray-Ban partnership and expanding to encompass all sorts of devices. Lenovo’s Visual AI Glasses V1 are just the latest smart eyewear launched in the past few years, but one particular factor sets them apart. The Chinese brand has left out the camera, choosing instead to dedicate space (and brain power) to artificial intelligence functions and the projected display needed to make the most of that AI. The lightweight wearable is only announced for China at the moment, at a positively affordable R10,000 (¥4,000), but they’re interesting…

It’s no ’30 minutes or less’, but Amazon South Africa is making deliveries a little easier to cope with by introducing selectable delivery time slots that’ll let customers choose when that impulse purchase shows up. Called Multiple-Delivery Windows, the addition applies to buyers in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town (for now), as long as they reside in “postal codes eligible for same-day delivery”. And, of course, the product itself supports said delivery. Havin’ an Amazon time Rabid shoppers won’t be able to specify that their shiny new trinket turns up first thing in the morning, but they can define one…

There are a few things genuinely terrifying about living in Africa, and one of those is the proliferation of venomous snakes. If a black mamba or boomslang gets you, you’d best hope there’s someone nearby with a package of antivenom. But it’s a pain in the backside to make (horses are involved) and isn’t always terribly effective, even when it is on hand. Danish researchers at DTU (Danmarks Tekniske Universitet) Bioengineering seem to have hit on something useful for the African market — a nanobody-based antivenom. A round of antivenom, please The researchers recently published a paper in Nature dealing…

You can’t fault Chinese brand Oppo for trying. The company’s new Reno 14 is a visually impressive smartphone that should handle most of what you can throw at it. However, no amount of shiny wizardry on the phone’s backplate can disguise the fact that there isn’t much difference between this model and last year’s Reno 13. We’ll get to all that in a moment, but there’s also the price to consider. At R20,000 (R22k, at some outlets), Oppo really has to yank some performance tricks out of the bag to make this a compelling buy compared to the Samsung Galaxy…

Something new could be coming to Google Maps, and if Android Authority’s sleuthing is correct, it’s a feature that simplifies navigation. Since the last few major features of the find-your-way app have upped the complexity, it could be a welcome change. But Google’s plans aren’t about reducing your cognitive overhead. Instead, it’s a power-saving mode for your mobile device. Intended to extend battery life on longer trips, the upcoming feature would strip out everything except for where you’re going. At least, that’s what is lurking in the 25.44.03.824313610 beta of Google Maps for Android. Maps could go dark Several lines of…

Huawei is gearing up to release a Mate 70 Air, a rival to Apple’s iPhone Air and Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge, if a recently leaked posted (and a bunch of specs) is to be believed. Whether that’s a great idea, with Apple scaling back the iPhone Air and Samsung (possibly) canning the Edge lineup entirely, remains to be seen. Visuals of the handset, taken from a physical poster, show a very skinny handset with an unmistakable Huawei camera bump. The curved edges (visible above) are apparently a consequence of the poster and are not part of the final design. Pity.…