Author: Brett Venter

Apple does love a good surprise, even if sometimes it’s not very surprising. The company has confirmed that there’s one more thing headed our way this year. What that is, exactly, will be unveiled at a 30 October event. The tagline for the outing? ‘Scary Fast’. Which, based on the date, makes perfect sense. Odds are we’ll see Tim Cook dressed as Bill Gates (or maybe Tom Hanks) if there’s room for levity at the Apple campus this late in the year. It’s far more likely we’ll be bombarded by spooky puns and references to the new chipset the company…

Apple seems to be the only company not enthusiastically bouncing on board the generative AI bandwagon. This is for a variety of reasons. The company is notoriously cagey about anything it’s doing, preferring to remain silent until it thinks it can reliably blow minds. Plus, this artificial intelligence thing is tricky and apparently the tech giant is trying to do it right. A new report suggests a timeline for when we might see more advanced AI appear on iPhones around the world. The soonest it will occur, according to analyst Jeff Pu, is when Apple unleashes iOS 18 onto the world.…

Chinese tech maker Xiaomi has a new batch of goodies headed to market soon. The official reveal has just been confirmed for this week, on 26 October. Since the event is being held in China, we’ll probably see some of the details late on 25 October. On the menu is the company’s 14 series smartphones. If the naming pattern sticks around, we’re likely to see a Xiaomi 14, a 14 Lite, a 14 Pro, and perhaps even a 14 Ultra. That’s not counting any 14T editions that happen to turn up somewhere along the line. Oh, and there’s some new…

India’s Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced that it plans to extend the country’s reach into space over the next decade and a half. The start of this was the recent successful mission to the lunar surface with its Chandrayaan-3 mission. The country’s Vikram lander and Pragyan rover might have stopped responding, as of 22 September, but the mission was enough of a success to allow the country to consider sending humans up there next. This includes developing its own launch capability, constructing a space station, and, eventually, putting Indian boots on the moon using the country’s own hardware. India…

South Africa has been lucky when it comes to Netflix price increases. We’ve seen one uptick in costs since the service launched, dodging the January 2022 increase that much of the rest of its customers were nailed with. Will we be lucky again? That… depends. The news that Netflix plans to hike costs isn’t new, but this time it’s come directly from the streamer. During the company’s recent financial results call, it announced that its Basic and Premium plans would increase, starting in the States. Paying Netflix’s price Those two plans will increase by $2 each (about forty bucks), climbing…

There isn’t much of a gap between the announcement of the new Chromebook Plus standard and the arrival of its first representative, the Acer Chromebook Plus 514, in South Africa. We’ve had our hands on it for a short while and it might just have solved the largest issues we’ve had with Chromebooks in general — the hardware. Chromebooks, being mostly reliant on an internet connection and software to function, have historically been slack when it comes to the hardware. The new Plus standard demands at least 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, an Intel Core i3 or AMD…

Amazon.co.za is set to be a thing at an indeterminate point next year, according to the company. Talk of the company’s presence has been solidly expected since 2022, though speculation (and hope) have been around much longer. Now there’s an official date. Sort of. 2024 is the only timeline the company has offered, though if we were to guess we’d say February 2024 is as good a time as any. That’s when the last rumoured launch was supposed to take place, even if that deadline was missed. Explore the Amazon The reason for today’s announcement is that local sellers are…

Grand Theft Auto V and Skyrim get a lot of flak for the number of times they’ve been released but these titles don’t touch Minecraft’s numbers. Make no mistake, GTA V is popular. But it’s not 300 million copies sold popular. That’s the number of units Microsoft’s blocky building title has managed to shift since it first turned up way back in 2009. A ‘proper’ version was launched in 2011 and then Microsoft took over the reins in 2014 after giving the game’s creator $2.5 billion. With a ‘b’. Obviously, someone in acquisitions knew what they were doing. Hell, even…

Load shedding has prompted some strange products but none are perhaps as odd as power banks you can rent for a bit. But you can always get odder. Uber Eats has teamed up with Adoozy Power, the company behind the aforementioned power bank rentals, to arrange delivery of your essential backup (which you inexplicably forgot to bring along) at any time. Thanks to a new feature called ‘Adoozy Collect’ within the app, Uber Eats users will be able to request (and return) a rented power bank to the company handing them out. Most South Africans have become pretty power-savvy in…

Artificial intelligence is slowly gaining control over more human infrastructure. This isn’t a recent thing, either. Google’s Project Greenlight has been around for a couple of years already, starting as a pilot program at a few intersections in Israel. It’s about to expand to more countries. About now, you’re probably asking yourself what Greenlight is all about (unless you’re great at inferring from context). The Google Research project uses artificial intelligence to monitor and alleviate congestion at intersections. This is achieved by letting computer systems autonomously alter the timing of traffic lights. Given the Greenlight Never mind that screwing with…