Author: Brett Venter

If you’ve ever seen the Disney animated film Wall-E, you’ll have a fairly good idea of what most folks reckon a robot made by Apple would look like. HINT: It’s not Wall-E himself. But you might not have to speculate on what the actual design might look like. The fruit company may show everyone in the somewhat-near future. That’s according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who tends to have a very clear inside line on what the company is up to at any given moment. And Gurman reckons that Apple has teams investigating the feasibility of developing and launching a line…

Interest in Xiaomi’s first electric vehicle, the SU7, appears to be high following the company’s initial shipment to buyers. Pre-orders for the EV opened last week, with Xiaomi chalking up almost 90,000 orders within the first 24 hours. The first deliveries of the SU7 have already been made, with the vehicles coming from a pool of 5,000 that were manufactured and ready for shipping. Everyone else on the pre-order list, which numbers well in excess of the 88,898 reported initial orders, has a fair while longer to wait. A little over six months, in fact. The SU7 queue That wait…

We don’t get Huawei’s Watch Pro series here in South Africa but a recent leak about an updated Watch 4 Pro makes us awfully sad that that’s not the case. Images of what looks like a near-retail version of a Space Exploration Edition of the high-end wearable have turned up online. What isn’t explained is what makes this the ‘Space Exploration Edition’. There’s a slight visual difference — the titanium casing is a darker shade than the stock 4 Pro and there are red accents in view. Beyond that, your guess is as good as ours. Watch 4 Pro updates?…

Budget notebooks are becoming harder to find. Part of this is inflation pushing what used to be considered entry-level up above the R5,000 mark but what are you supposed to do if you don’t have quite that much money on hand? Packard Bell’s McLaren C1 reckons it has the answer to that. This notebook features a small form factor with a similarly compact price point but you should know what you’re buying before you put your cash down. The first thing you should know is that this highly affordable notebook is sometimes labelled as the McLaren C in South Africa.…

If you’ve been using Google Chrome’s Incognito mode believing that the internet giant wasn’t tracking you, you haven’t been paying attention to American legal proceedings. The search company has offered to delete its store of Incognito data as part of a settlement for an ongoing class-action lawsuit concerning the browser ‘feature’. The lawsuit was instituted in 2020 by users upset that Incognito didn’t prevent Google from tracking their browsing and other activity while the feature was active. At best it kept data about their activities off their computers, which makes sense since the most recent updates to the function are…

WWDC 2024 was always going to happen. Apple is as regular as someone who is utterly religious about their fibre intake. It’s just a question of when it’ll all come out. The answer, in this case, is 10 June, which is when Apple will update the world on the latest from its software (and hardware) departments. The word(s) for the event is AI. Or artificial intelligence. Or, technically, “Absolutely Incredible” but the not-suspicious-at-all capitalisation is a dead giveaway. Whatever else comes from the fruit company, there’s AI on the menu. The major question is what form it will take. WWDC…

That was quick. Chinese tech maker Xiaomi intends to start shipping its new SU7 EV to market in China this month. It’s quite a speedy turnaround from the first serious discussions about the brand making its own electric vehicles in 2021, though it’s likely that plans were in the pipeline for longer than that. Reuters reports that the announcement came via Weibo, the Chinese social media service. The company said that nearly 60 stores across 29 cities in China will take orders for the vehicle. A launch event is planned for 28 March, though the Speed Ultra 7 (SU7) has…

It might be time to consider LinkedIn Premium as part of your job search plans. Not because Microsoft has released yet more paid-for AI features, though that’s certainly the plan in 2024. No, it’s because Microsoft is making a fair chunk of money from the service now. The reason you should consider paying for a subscription is that all these other folks are. Microsoft revealed its revenue from LinkedIn Premium for the first time, scooping R32 billion ($1.7 billion) for the company in 2023. If that many of your employment competitors are getting a leg up, it’s probably time to…

Apple quietly announced the M3 upgrade to its MacBook Air lineup earlier this week and South Africa has just as quietly gotten pre-order details. More or less. Whether you’re after an upgraded 13in or 15in Air, you can register your interest today. The hardware is expected to launch in the country on 15 March, which is in keeping with the trend of having this stuff turn up on a Friday. After all, pre-orders opened today. Availability a week later is typically Apple. Drive a new M3 If you’re after the smaller of the two MacBook Air models, expect to pay…

Shure is a relatively new brand on Stuff South Africa’s radar but we had great fun with the company’s Aonic 40 last year. The Shure Aonic 50 Gen 2 turned up recently for another go at impressing the audio nerds at Stuff HQ and we have to say that it gave a good accounting of itself. The Aonic 50 Gen 2 isn’t perfect. You can look toward more notable brands if your conditions include a slice of perfection in your headphones. But it’s got loads to offer for folks looking for an alternative to the same old faces scrabbling for…