Author: Toby Shapshak

The iPad Pro is getting a much-needed update – but only next year. This will coincide with the 10th anniversary of Apple’s market-dominating tablet, writes Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, one of the best commenters on the fruit company. As he points out the iPad Pro is getting its “first major overhaul in half a decade, and it can’t come soon enough”. Not only is the whole tablet in the doldrums, but the iPad lineup is a confusing mess. I spent a few hours earlier this year trying to make sense of the convoluted options. I always buy Apple gear from Incredible,…

Anticompetitive oversight has been ramping up around the world. Lawmakers in the US and the EU have tried to counter the dominance of big tech firms, and in South Africa, too, the matter has received attention — the Competition Commission released its “Online Intermediation Platforms Market Inquiry” report on 31 July after two years of investigation of the companies’ competition behaviour on the internet. Tech giant Google “distorts platform competition”, while e-commerce site Takealot’s marketplace for other sellers is a “conflict of interest”, the report finds. Other findings include: Booking.com “creates a dependency that is used to extract higher commission…

Samsung’s new Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Flip 5 have folding glass screens, an engineering innovation that still delights Stuff’s editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak. Mobile executives Justin Hume and Zahir Cajee join in the geek-out. Samsung’s folding glass still astounds Also available on Apple Podcasts | Spotify

In a sea of bad news for Elon Musk, there was one piece of good news: Tesla has started making its electric bakkie. The Cybertruck, as it’s called, is a futuristic-looking pickup that was first announced in November 2019. The Tesla CEO’s unveiling of it featured what is now a meme when he was trying to demonstrate how tough the car’s glass was. A steel cannonball was thrown against the window, which was promptly smashed, and Musk blurted out “Oh my f****** god” to riotous laughter. Electric bakkies and big promises Last month, Tesla announced, on X, obviously, “First Cybertruck…

Instead of buying expensive textbooks, which learners are stuck with, what if you could “rent” them? Calling it “Spotify for textbooks,” this is the idea behind MTN’s new educational offering, MTN South Africa’s general manager of digital services Jason Probert tells says Stuff editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak. Joining them is Thabiet Allie, the head of new business development and who is driving the operator’s online learning. Don’t break the bank, rent your textbooks Also available on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts

One of my son’s favourite books is James and Giant Peach. I was just as enthralled when it was read to me as a child. I recall my mental images of a peach so big it had tunnels inside it, and you could just bite into it to taste that cool, refreshing peach flesh. As unrealistic and fantastical as it seemed, who doesn’t want to fly in a giant peach borne by seagulls? Apple is that giant, well, peach. Preserving the Peach Apple It was merely a coincidence that we were reading this Roald Dahl classic when Apple hit that…

Whether TikTokker Mikayla Nogueira was wearing false eyelashes or not is probably not a question that has crossed the minds of the average techie reader. But the furore over “mascara gate” as it was dubbed, is whether so-called influencers can be trusted. Finding sanity in the deinfluencing trend Nogueira, a so-called beauty influencer with 14 million followers on TikTok, did a paid-for post for L’Oréal in February to promote its mascara. But by the end, she appeared to be wearing false eyelashes. Angry social media users have done a frame-by-frame analysis and a wave of indignation has erupted online. “When…

The only thing worse than being spoken about, as Elon Musk is discovering over at Twitter 𝕏, is not being spoken about. The owner of Twitter 𝕏 has mangled the purchase so badly, having fired so much staff, cut back on server hosting, refused to pay outstanding rent and hosting fees, and alienated the advertisers who support it. Many commentators believe this caused server instability and why Musk instituted the 600-tweet limit last month. Although he later increased this “temporary emergency measure” and blamed it on “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” purportedly by artificial intelligence (AI) services…

If only tweets could come true. Wouldn’t you love to see Elon Musk fight Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight? I’m no fan of physical confrontations like boxing or mixed martial arts – but I’m sure I could eat a bowl of popcorn watching the two mega-dorks of all geekdom fight it out. All of geekdom, as it happens, seems to be thrilled at the prospect. There are memes and everything. Zuckerberg would obviously win because the Facebook CEO is a practising health fanatic with an overzealous competitive streak, who has recently embraced competitive jiu-jitsu. Just kiss already “I’m up…

When Google introduced a way to sell YouTube video adverts on other websites, it offered its customers a quick way to expand their video adverts’ reach. But Google violated its own service obligations by as much as 80%, according to an explosive new report by research firm Adalytics, which tracks how adverts appear online. While Google promised advertisers they would “gain up to 20% additional reach for a given budget” and that its video partners would be “high-quality publisher websites and mobile apps”. They weren’t. A true view of Google’s schemes  Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, says Adalytics.…