Author: Toby Shapshak

Last month Apple dropped a bombshell on the tech world when it announced it was ditching Intel’s chips in favour of its own processors. It’s monumental for a number of reasons, not least of which is the ending of the 13-year relationship with the world’s largest chipmaker which helped propel Apple on its decade-long stock market stratospheric run. When CEO Steve Jobs announced in 2005 that Apple would shift over to Intel’s processors, it was a strategic masterstroke. To understand why, we need a quick refresher on the nature of computer software development – which will become even more relevant…

Fifty-six billion dollars. That’s what Facebook’s share price lost on Friday after news that consumer giant Unilever would pull its advertising for the rest of the year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth took a $7bn hit. After years of ignoring its biggest problem, Facebook is finally being confronted by its inability to control disinformation, hate speech and the insidious rise of white supremacy (and all its viciousness) on its platform. Years of promises to do better and to fix the problems, and initiatives like bringing in external fact-checkers and deleting malicious and bot accounts, haven’t stopped the innumerable controversies that…

While many tech manufacturers have paused their big product announcement, not everybody has. Sonos – makers of some of the finest audio equipment I have ever heard – thankfully haven’t. They announced their very fine Arc under-TV speaker, and two others. But a little background is necessary to understand the relevance. Sonos makes excellent streaming audio speakers, which use your WiFi instead of cables. They aren’t cheap but they are good, really good. And they work seamlessly. Plug a Sonos One in the first room, another in the second and a bigger setup in the TV room and they all…

We found it eventually in a tub of Lego. It was one of the many very minor crises of the Great Covid Lockdown of April 2020. Towards the end of the strict five-week shelter-in-place, our three-year-old son lost our DStv remote. No tech stores were even open, while grocery stores generally don’t stock emergency DStv remotes. We watched the news through the DStv Now app for three days, until we played with that box of Lego. It was a subtle reminder of how important, even in this age of streaming, access to news is. Our TV sets have evolved, as…

As hard as it seems to overwhelmed the exciting first private launch of humans from Earth and the successful docking with the International Space Station, there was actually a bigger story in tech in the last week.

So, this is the new normal. Here we are. After the worst of lockdown, as it were, on level three. What does it mean and how will our lives and the nature of work change? We’ve been hearing about this “new normal” for the last two months. The only consistent thing appears to be that you still can’t buy cigarettes. Two months of lockdown have decimated the economy, let’s hope it was worth it. Now we have to rebuild. What is certain is that the economic landscape post-COVID is much like the devastated wasteland you see in futuristic sci-fi movies.…

You can’t buy flip-flops in-store, but you can online; while you can only buy a T-shirt if it’s worn under your clothes. If you weren’t aware that our government has lost the plot with its own convoluted attempts at stopping Covid-19, the latest round of absurdities in the lockdown regulations should alert you to it. Our economy is trashed (by a decade of Zumarisation before the lockdown) and desperately needs some coherent and practical solutions. That our government has time to fiddle with such madness as what clothes you can buy and what time of the day to exercise, shows…

Dear Parliament, let me tell you about some great meeting software called Teams. It’s made by Microsoft, the same people with whom government has a big contract for software. It’s part of the package and you can run a whole company on it. Microsoft itself has been doing this internally for years – known in the tech industry as “eating your own dog food” – while innumerable large companies have discovered how to in the last two months since the Covid-19 pandemic. Why Teams and not the easier-to-use Zoom? Well, after last week’s Zoombombing of the programming committee of the…

As middle-class South Africa emerges from self-isolation, blinking in the sunlight and the harsh reality of this new normal, there seemed a palpable lift in the country’s spirits this week. Perhaps I am projecting because I have been able to go for an early morning walk with my wife and nearly three-year-old son for the last three days. The sense of camaraderie is so 1994, but with facemasks. So, this is what level four looks like. Restricted exercise, mandatory face masks (it’s been de rigueur in Asia for over a decade) and takeaways. The early signs of a restarting economy.…

After years of denying they could filter out disinformation, the social media giants have suddenly been able to effectively keep rampant fake news off their platforms. All it took was an unprecedented global pandemic where false information could be life-threatening. Suddenly, human lives outweighed he need to keep eyeballs glued to your platform, at any cost and with any drivel (looking especially at you Facebook and YouTube). With such a stark contrast, the obvious response from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube and others was an outright ban. Rational people the world over sighed in relief. So, science-based arguments work…