Author: Brett Venter

Artificial intelligence (AI) is hugely energy-intensive. How do we know? Because Microsoft is busy setting up a deal that would use the output from a nuclear reactor to supply power to the company. For AI reasons, though the company might not use the output for AI directly. The deal would see the retired Unit 1 nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, the site of America’s closest call with a nuclear meltdown, returning online after “prematurely” retiring in 2019. The reactor’s owner, Constellation, announced its part of the deal in a release on its website. Microsoft goes nuclear The deal, which…

Some folks learn by reading. Others do better by writing things down. But what if your learning is done by listening to two people you’ve never met talk about a subject? Then a new feature of Google’s NotebookLM is for you. Called Audio Overview, it takes the documents you feed it and turns them into a, for lack of a better word, podcast that you can listen to. No more bullet points or reading or any of that hard stuff. Just let that sweet, sweet AI bump information into your head verbally. A new NotebookLM Don’t believe us? We wouldn’t…

Canva, the online image creation service that started as the value proposition, is getting ready to burn its reputation in search of more money. How? By hiking its prices by around 300%, once you get past the ‘discounted’ first year. You don’t have to panic if you’re a Canva Pro user (for now) but if your company pays for Teams, that annual subscription price is about to get considerably pricier. This is no Multichoice-sized incremental price increase, either. Canva comes for your wallet The company doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have for this increase either. Currently, South Africans pay…

It’s time once again to ask whether you really need the newest iPhone. That’s not a situation unique to the newly-announced iPhone 16 Pro Max and it’s not a difficult question to answer either. Apple does its level best each year to ensure that the answer is ‘yes’. 2024 seems to be no exception. But it may not necessarily be the case. Particularly for users who bought an iPhone 15 Pro Max at any time in the last twelve-month cycle, an immediate upgrade may not be the most sensible choice. If your iPhone is getting long in the tooth –…

Following extensive delays, the SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission has successfully lifted off from Earth and entered orbit. The private spacefaring mission has several objectives but the main one is also the sexiest — the first private spacewalk from a crewed orbital capsule. That will take place two days into Polaris Dawn’s projected five-day mission, on 12 September. Based on SpaceX’s concept videos, it’s little more than opening the door to Crew Dragon and having the crew poke their heads out, but even that’s terrifying enough, surely? Polaris Dawn rising Today’s SpaceX mission saw billionaire enthusiast Jared Isaacman, Anna Menon, Scott…

In what is totally not an attempt to upstage Apple’s iPhone 16 announcement, Huawei has made its tri-fold Mate XT smartphone official. Not to be confused with the exoskeleton of the same name, the newest Mate has… well, two hinges and three sections that fold together. Pre-orders for the device, which remained unannounced until early this morning, opened over the weekend in China. Since then, Huawei claims it has scooped up a whopping 3.7 million pre-orders. Those numbers are especially ridiculous when the Mate XT’s price is taken into account. My new Mate XT More on that in a second,…

If you’re used to Apple’s claims, you’ll know that they sometimes get a touch… grandiose. Frequently the company can back it up and the new iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max are possibly the most advanced consumer smartphones ever made. This isn’t just born from the internal component upgrades. Apple’s AI implementation is also key. Everything you’ve seen announced for the iPhone 16 is implemented here but the dedicated camera and audio recording upgrades are also phenomenal. Assuming they work the way Apple says they will. They probably do. Look outside This year’s Pro smartphones are the largest examples…

There was always going to be a new Apple Watch, and the Watch Series 10 is predictably the most advanced wristwear from the company without an ‘Ultra’ appended to the end of it. The company announced a batch of visual and construction upgrades, as well as improved medical capability and software upgrades. Some of the latter, conferred by WatchOS 11, will bring new features to both the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Watch Ultra 2. If you recently caved in to a new Apple wearable, you won’t need to jump up to Series 10 right away—unless you really want…

An image is currently floating around online claiming to show Samsung’s still-rumoured Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition smartphone. If that line sounds skeptical, that’s because the source of the image, Android Headlines, doesn’t explain where this image is supposed to have come from. The image isn’t from the typical run of Samsung ‘leaks’, which tend to be lower-resolution versions of the company’s official photography. It looks nothing like any internal materials but could be a digital mock-up of the device. It may also be one of the ‘blanks’ used by case manufacturers to create accessories before a product is official.…

Chances are you’ve never encountered Samsung Food, an app-based service available on the company’s smart fridges. That hardware doesn’t come to this side of the planet but the updated version of the app just might. Instead of running on a fridge, this newly AI-upgraded service will also operate on a smartphone. Samsung showed off the new features at this year’s IFA conference in Berlin, a year after it originally launched at the German event. Samsung Food for thought The app was previously dedicated to making food lists, planning meals, and otherwise supplying Samsung with product creation data using a Samsung…