Author: Brett Venter

Quite often, when you reach a milestone age, you start thinking about doing something crazy. Porsche just turned 75 this week. Its present to itself is a little something called the Mission X. Whether you’ll ever be able to buy this crazy hypercar concept isn’t certain yet but you’re definitely going to want to. The German automaker has built it to similar dimensions to the Carrera GT and 918 Spyder but has given it EV internals capable of charging to full incredibly quickly. It’s Porsche’s birthday The Mission X is the successor to the Mission R, which was seen in…

We know that social media is becoming increasingly wacky but we’re not quite at the point where we’re filming our internal organs. Yet. We’re getting close, however. The NaviCam is a medical device currently in development by researchers at George Washington University (GWU). It is… what you’d expect to get from a product with this name. It’s a camera that can be swallowed. That’s not all that unique. They exist but current versions are reliant on gravity and the body’s whims to get where it needs to go. The team at the GW School of Medicine & Health Sciences has…

South Africa is due to receive a new electric SUV soon. The Volvo EX30, announced this afternoon, is being billed as one of the country’s most affordable EVs. Granted, that’s not hard to do, but a starting price for the new compact SUV of R776,000 has it in the running for the best-priced (known brand) electric vehicle in the country. ‘Compact’ is the operative word when describing Volvo’s newest vehicle, though that’s also a relative term for the range. The petrol-driven XC90 measures almost five metres from end to end. By comparison, the EX30 features dimensions of 4,233mm x 1,836mm…

Taiwanese tech maker Asus makes loads of Zenbooks. Perhaps too many, but that’s a rant for another day. The latest entry from the company is the Asus Zenbook S 13, an update on a model released last year that, amazingly, Stuff didn’t actually get to test. We might have… but this model’s lacking an S. It’s a pity, too, because we’d have loved to have something to compare this unit directly to. The Zenbook S 13 does a lot to justify its R33,000 price tag, being among the neatest, lightest Windows machines we’ve ever had the pleasure of using. But…

Long years of rumour have culminated in Apple’s first set of augmented reality goggles. Turns out, everyone got the name wrong. Vision Pro is the moniker Apple has used for the newest hardware to issue forth from the company. At first glance, the ‘goggles’ concept is pretty literal. They’re reminiscent of space-age scuba gear but, in typical Apple style, the concept should grow on you. But, also in typical Apple style, the Vision Pro goggles aren’t really doing anything new. The hardware’s abilities and features aren’t unique. Meta’s Oculus hardware has augmented reality functions. So does Microsoft’s Hololens. But Apple…

Apple’s WWDC events don’t usually go too hard on hardware but the newly announced M2 Ultra chipset is the best thing to happen to personal computing, ever. That’s not us making the claim, obviously. The fruit company blitzed through the announcement but made it very clear that the M2 Ultra is the latest, greatest invention in the history of processors. Which is why Apple has placed it inside both the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro lineup. You remember the cheese grater, don’t you? But these units are typically designed for use in industrial contexts — high-end video editing and…

Is it possible that we might see an NFT implementation that fulfils the promise the technology originally promised? A new partnership between EA Sports and Nike’s .SWOOSH digital collectibles platform might one day make that a reality. The team-up, on the face of it, sounds like a great idea — if the participants can pull it off. It will involve creating “new immersive experiences” so that players are able to “unlock brand-new levels of customization within the EA Sports ecosystem”. But we’ll believe it when we see it. EA Sports takes a swing at NFTs It’s ambitious, though. .SWOOSH was…

The annual Computex event in Taipei is where serious computer nerdery takes place. This year, Cooler Master may have won the category for Weirdest Gadget(s) We Never Realised We Needed To Own with a couple of custom PC case designs. As the header image and headline suggest, the PC designs resemble a shoe, in the case of the Sneaker X, and a shark. That would be the appropriately-named Shark X case design. And yes, at least one of them will become available at retail at some point in the future. Is there anything Cooler Master? Since we’re not sure of…

Danish brick brand Lego is no stranger to partnerships, having launched sets based on Ferrari, Manchester United, all manner of Star Wars depictions, and many others. It’s also familiar with constructing life-sized objects from its iconic bricks, including the Lego Batmobile and a Bugatti Chiron (which actually moved under its own power). What if you combined something from column A with column B? That’s how you get a life-sized Lego Ferarri Monza SP1, a single-seater V12 that looks like it’s designed to shear its driver’s head off in the event of a collision. Of course, if you can afford to…

Meta, for all the talk of the company leaving the actual metaverse behind, was never going to stop releasing VR hardware. The Meta Quest 3 is now official, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg… and this official outline from the company’s website. The timing of the announcement isn’t suspicious at all. Later this month, Apple is expected to reveal its first crack at virtual reality or augmented reality hardware at WWDC 2023. Meta really wants to run ahead of that announcement, hence the early preview of the device that’ll launch in the third quarter of 2023. Quest 3: The Quest Rides Forth…