Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i APC

Your Mac, iPhone and iPad look set to change in fundamental ways later this year – and it’s all thanks to Apple take’s on artificial intelligence (AI), which the company’s renamed Apple Intelligence. Making its debut in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia this spring, Apple Intelligence will give you whole new ways to do things easier and faster, all the while safeguarding your privacy. Or that’s the promise. On iPhone, the most obvious change will be a revamped version of Siri, which now shimmers around the edge of your iPhone’s screen when you invoke it. Apple says Siri can glean facts about you, the things you like to do and your key relationships and combine them in useful ways. In its keynote Worldwide Developer Conference address in June,…

We explore the trends and technologies that are set to shape the future Woof, woof. You stare at your dog’s fluffy face and wonder two things: what does she want, and how do I make her stop? AI researchers are working on a way to answer that first question so you can then figure out the second, following a grand tradition of attempting to unpick what our pets are trying to say to us. In 2002, Japanese company Takeda launched the BowLingual dog translator (tinyurl.com/APC537bow), followed by the Meowlingual version for feline friends. By listening to the sounds your pets were making, this $75 device would supposedly reveal its mood via an onscreen display and a short phrase (think “I’m hungry”). It was awarded that year’s satirical Ig Nobel prize,…

ONEDRIVE Free Tier, www.microsoft.com GOOGLE DRIVE Free Tier, drive.google.com Tech giants Microsoft and Google each offer their own respective cloud storage services and web apps. OneDrive is built into Windows, so requires minimal setup. Windows 11 actually requires you to sign in via a Microsoft account during setup. This means, in theory, that every Windows user has at least a free OneDrive folder, so can automatically start backing up and syncing content. This plays well with Microsoft 365 users, as the free web versions of apps like Word and Excel can save files to your OneDrive folder. There may therefore seem little reason to use Google Drive. After all, it entails setting up a separate account and app. The 15GB of free cloud storage is more generous, but both Microsoft…

PRICE From $2,699 +keyboard WEB microsoft.com We are now up to the 11th edition of the Surface Pro, and the latest model is powered by the new Arm-based Qualcomm 12-core Snapdragon X Elite CPU with Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU. The now iconic detachable 2-in-1 from Microsoft features a 13in, 2880 x 1920 (3:2) OLED touchscreen with a 120Hz refresh rate, 600 nits brightness and 115% DCI-P3 colour accuracy. The display is a joy to use day to day – the only caveat being that while text is sharp at normal viewing distances, up close the touchscreen array is faintly visible as a fine grid. The X Elite equipped Surface Pro starts from $2,699 for the 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD model we have for testing, but costs $3,599 if you…

PRICE $609 (9700X), $479 (9600X) WEB amd.com Zen 5 is finally here for desktop PCs. The first releases are the six core Ryzen 5 9600X, and with two more cores, four more threads, and a tiny bit more clock, the Ryzen 7 9700X. AMD has stuck to the same fundamental floorplan for the 9700X as it has with the last generation 7700X and the Zen 3-powered 5700X. Underneath the heatspreader, you’ve got two chiplets: one CCD (Core Complex Die), which houses all the processing cores and cache, and one IOD (Input/Output Die) that’s home to a tiny integrated GPU, PCIe and USB hubs, and the RAM controllers. Where the CCD in the 9600X has two cores disabled, the 9700X comes with a fully enabled eight-core chiplet and a marginally higher…

Over the past 20 years, smartphones and tablets have gradually replaced standalone cameras and audio recorders. After all, why carry around three gadgets when one does everything you need and fits snugly into your pocket? As the quality of phone cameras and microphones has increased, so has the number of apps designed to help you make the most of your mobile device’s capabilities. This is particularly true of photo, music and video tools, which are now among the most popular in the Google Play and Apple App stores. Last October, consumer-insights company Statista reported that four in 10 of us regularly use photo-editing apps (tinyurl.com/APC537statista) – way ahead of news, fitness and dating apps. However, for every good app, there are thousands of awful ones that are more interested in…

Malwarebytes & VPNs Is there any reason why Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Premium flags up – and blocks – IP addresses that appear to be linked to my VPN (Private Internet Access)? Is this some cynical attempt to get me to switch to its own VPN product instead? Nicole J Villegas APC Responds: There is a longstanding issue between IP addresses used by Private Internet Access and Malwarebytes’ real-time protection component. There’s little help to be had from Malwarebytes – PIA is flagged as being one of several third-party apps (many of them rival security products) that can cause problems with MBAM’s Web Protection, one of its four real-time protection components. Malwarebytes’ solution is to disable Web Protection, which results in a frequent nag that it’s not enabled. You can turn this…

CHROME Chat with AI tool Gemini from the address bar Google has now added several AI features to Chrome and launched an Android app for its AI chatbot Gemini (previously called Bard), but – at the time of writing – these aren’t yet available in Australia. However, you can interact with Gemini by visiting its website (https://gemini.google.com/) and entering a text prompt, uploading an image or speaking a command. While we wait for the new AI tools to roll out here, Google has updated Chrome with a Gemini shortcut. This lets you start a conversation with the chatbot directly from the browser’s address bar, without opening the Gemini website first. Type @ into the address bar and click ‘Chat with Gemini’ in the set of options that opens below (see…

PRICE Free/in game purchases PLATFORM PC, PS5, IOS, Android WEB zenless.hoyoverse.com Zenless Zone Zero adopts a zesty Hi-Fi Rush style of neon-accented sci-fi urbanism, a meaningless pushback on glossy businesses with political power. Zenless Zone Zero is a reskinned revenue stream designed to target a similar-but-different audience to MiHoYo’s other unstoppable gacha-style games Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. It’s been created to capture a gap in the market. I’m not surprised. Gacha games like this are by design wallet-opening merch machines in disguise. The aim is to get me coming back every day to do a few things that make me feel good enough to consider using the shop. It’s all bright and colourful and very carefully designed to not look like it’s trying to do anything other than…

I spend a lot of time testing browsers and finding interesting things to say about them. This was much easier before Chrome, Edge and Firefox switched to incremental releases, back when each new version introduced exciting tools, rather than ‘bug fixes’ and under-the-bonnet tweaks. It’s no wonder several new browsers have sprung up in the last year, while the big names obsess about AI. These include DuckDuckGo’s private browser (https://duckduckgo.com/windows), the Japanese-made Floorp (https://floorp.app) and the climate- conscious Ecosia Browser (www.ecosia.org/browser). However, the most hyped browser of 2024 is Arc from The Browser Company (www.arc.net). Arc’s website claims the browser “shapes itself” and “doesn’t just meet your needs – it anticipates them”, which implies it’s some form of personal-hygiene product. But spurred on by a review that said Arc “makes…

BlueAnt Soundblade This under-monitor soundbar from Australia’s BlueAnt would look great under any PC or Mac, but particularly the latest iMacs and AIOs, thanks to its slick design and the fact that it’s available in any one of five matching colours: Pink, Blue, Green, Charcoal and White (Yellow, Orange and Purple iMac owners miss out for now). Already the winner of a Red Dot design award, the Soundblade offers up to 120W of peak power output, delivered by a 2.1-channel speaker arrangement that comprises 2x full-range dual voice coil, dual neodymium magnet drivers and an 80mm subwoofer. All of which makes it perfect for watching movies, playing games and listening to your favourite tunes while sitting at your desk. Getting everything connected is easy too with Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C and…

PRICE $3,499 WEB asus.com/au The Asus ZenBook S16 stands out as one of the first laptops to feature the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU, which boasts efficient performance and a 50 TOPs NPU. The laptop has a big 16in form factor, but uses a high strength ceramic aluminum construction to be both robust yet lightweight. The S 16 looks fantastic on a desk, and the build quality is better than most – as you’d expect considering the AU$3,499 RRP. The Zenbook is well equipped, with a 3K (2880 x 1800) OLED touchscreen, 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The display is vibrant and bright (400 nits), very smooth (120Hz refresh rate), has great colour accuracy (100% DCI-P3) and comes with an Asus drawing stylus. The S…

PRICE $799 WEB https://www.samsung.com/au After being deluged with expensive, bleeding-edge gaming monitors, it was almost refreshing to have Samsung’s ViewFinity S80UD arrive at our door. It’s a 32-inch, UHD monitor whose features focus on OH&S more than gaming. Sounds exciting? Let’s find out. The S80UD’s 32-inch, IPS panel has a non-reflective coating and a high, 3,840 x 2,160 resolution. It’s bright (350-nit), uniformly lit and displays a very sharp, crisp and clear Windows Desktop with vibrant colours. We turned on HDR which dropped the brightness a little but kept the Windows usable. When watching multimedia we found that contrast was generally very good with many details being revealed in bright and dark areas. However, it could struggle to reveal details in particularly dark areas when bright lights were also involved…

PRICE $245 (1TB); $392 (2TB); $613 (4TB) WEB www.westerndigital.com Western Digital unveiled the mouth-filling SanDisk Professional Pro-Blade modular SSD ecosystem in mid-2022 to serve the needs of the professional market. The Pro-Blade family comprises of three product lines: compact and sturdy NVMe drives (Pro-Blade SSD Mags), a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20Gb/s) enclosure for the mags (Pro-Blade Transport), and a four-bay Thunderbolt enclosure (Pro-Blade Station) directly compatible with the mags. The mags are essentially M.2 2280 NVMe SSDs with a proprietary connector that directly exposes the internal PCIe Gen3 x4 interface, albeit with support for a higher number of mating cycles compared to the native M.2 2280 internal SSD one. “The mags have a gumstick form factor. They are essentially a thermal cladding for an M.2 2280 NVMe SSD with…

PRICE $179 WEB au.turtlebeach.com US company Turtle Beach has made a decent set of wireless headphones with a microphone, which you can use for listening to music, chatting to your family and gaming – all for an affordable price. The list of features is impressive, including its huge 80-hour battery life. We didn’t need to charge these headphones once while testing them, which is impressive. Like most headphones, you can fiddle around with the settings using PC software or an app (depending on what you’re connected to), but they’re also well served by physical controls on the unit itself. These let you change the volume, adjust the audio and swap between its two connection options – 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (using a supplied USB dongle) or Bluetooth 5.2. Turtle Beach’s Swarm app,…

DEVELOPER Fyra Labs WEB https://ultramarine-linux.org LICENCE Mainly GPL Ultramarine is based on Fedora and, like its parent, follows a stable release cycle. The latest version is based on Fedora 40 and existing Fedora users can switch by way of a migration script, as opposed to installing Ultramarine from scratch. The site’s comprehensive wiki explains that the OS was created out of “frustration with the legal limits of Fedora”. Being based in Thailand, the developers aren’t restricted by US software patents, so can offer more packages. The result is a more user-friendly distro than plain old Fedora. For instance, Ultramarine allows users to install packages via its own Terra repository, RPM Fusion and Flathub. We focused on the Flagship Edition, which bundles the Budgie desktop environment, but alternative spins are available with…

The truth is that many of our communications are transmitted and stored insecurely. A malicious actor could intercept your messages in transit, or access them while they’re sitting on a provider’s servers – and then leak your personal information, forge messages using your identity or even blackmail you. You can reduce the risk by using a secure messaging platform. The problem is that there are several options to choose from. To an extent your choice may be guided by what your colleagues are using, but it’s well worth understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each one, and how you can use them to keep your correspondence private. iMessage iMessage is the official Apple instant messaging service. It’s available in the Messages app for iOS, iPadOS and macOS, and at its…

WINDOWS 11 Stop BitLocker encrypting your hard drive Computers that come with Windows 11 Pro include Microsoft’s BitLocker, which automatically encrypts your hard drive. If you don’t want this, you can stop it from happening when setting up a new computer or reinstalling Windows. On the screen that prompts you to choose your country, tap Shift+F10 to open Command Prompt. Now type regedit and press Enter to open the registry editor. Expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder, then SYSTEM, followed by CurrentControlSet, then Control and finally BitLocker. Alternatively, type this into the address bar at the top: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\Control\BitLocker ( 1 in our screenshot below). Right-click BitLocker 2 and select ‘Dword (32-bit) Value’, which will create an entry in the main panel. Rename this PreventDeviceEncryption 3 . Double-click this to open a…

HELP STATION | MAC IT WILL TAKE 15 mins YOU WILL LEARN How to digitise prints, negatives, and slides YOU’LL NEED Photomyne (Free, IAPs), iOS 15 or later Thanks to our ever-present iPhones, we are spoiled when it comes to shooting, editing and sharing thousands of photographs. However, in pre-digital days we were limited to shooting up to 36 photos on a roll of analogue film. Some of our prints might have been placed in photo albums or given pride of place in a picture frame, but the majority are probably still stacked in their original envelopes and hidden in a dark corner of a cupboard, attic or basement. In part one of this two-part tutorial, we’ll show you how to rescue these irreplaceable moments in time and give them…

Everything you need to know from the month in tech Back when AMD previewed the Zen 5 architecture, it promised an IPC gain averaging 16% over equivalent Zen 4 parts. While the new chips handily beat out the older ones in heavily threaded benchmarks, the gains were smaller in games. That led to some criticisms, with many gamers believing the new chips didn’t offer enough to tempt them to upgrade. “Reviews of the Ryzen 5 9600X, Ryzen 7 9700X, Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X highlight their power efficiency, cooler running and solid all-round performance.” AMD acknowledged these concerns in a blog post, saying its internal testing was “run in admin mode, which produced results that reflect branch prediction code optimisations not present in the version of Windows reviewers…

33 Microsoft Surface Pro 34 Asus ZenBook S16 35 AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU 36 AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU 38 Samsung ViewFinity S80UD 32 39 Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCD 40 WD Gold 24TB 41 SanDisk Pro-Blade 42 Netgear Orbi 970 43 Ultimate Ears Everboom Speaker 43 Turtle Beach Stealth 600 Gen 3 APC is Australia’s oldest consumer technology magazine – having been consistently in print for over forty years, since our first issue way back in May 1980 – and we take that heritage and responsibility very seriously. While our focus is obviously on the personal computer the very definition of the PC has changed and shifted markedly since the early 1980s. As such, we touch on many other areas of tech, too, from smartphones and…

PRICE $2,399 WEB rog.asus.com We’ve seen several ultimate gaming monitors in recent months but, from the specs alone, Asus might just have made the most ultimate: 480Hz refresh rate, matte-screen HDR OLED, 32-inch 4K. It’s like a spoiled child got greedy and Asus obliged its demands. There is a caveat: 480Hz is only achievable at a Full HD resolution (it’s 240Hz at UHD), but for the FPS gamers who want such speed, that’ll suit them down to the ground. We didn’t think we could tell the difference between 360Hz and 480Hz but (along with the rapid 0.03ms pixel response time) there’s essentially no motion blur at all. Running the TestUFO benchmark delivered pin-sharp alien eyes that we’ve only glimpsed on BenQ’s skunkworks Tn-based panels – and those are extremely limited…

NEEDS Windows 10 or 11 WEB github.com/roines45/glow A few months ago it looked like Glow had reached its final version, but the popularity of the program has persuaded its developer to keep it going. That’s good news for us because the free system-information tool now receives frequent updates and continues to evolve and improve, and we do hope that continues. Since we last wrote about Glow, it’s been updated six times and has added a host of handy features for analysing your PC. The most notable are two benchmarking tools, which test the performance of your processor and hard drive to ensure they’re working properly. These new options are in the Tools menu in Glow’s top-right corner. Select ‘CPU Benchmark Tool’ to benchmark your processor, then specify the length of…

The games we play PRICE $36.99 PLATFORM PC, Mac, Linux WEB tinyurl.com/APC537anger I don’t mean to pigeonhole Anger Foot by reducing it to first-person Hotline Miami, but that’s pretty much the elevator pitch for the game. Enemies go down in one hit, but so do you (with a few exceptions) and levels are tight little labyrinths where each room demands you clear it with maximum aggression and efficiency. The other top-line gameplay feature is your titular angry foot – not to be confused with the game’s protagonist, Anger Foot. You’re a single button-press away from one of the better melee attacks I’ve ever seen in a game, an instant-kill boot in the face that comes out fast with a generous hitbox. Every fight begins with you blasting a door open…

PRICE $45.99 PLATFORM PC, XBS/X WEB dungeonsofhinterberg.com Luisa is a young lawyer from Vienna, and she’s burned out. Dungeons of Hinterberg leans into millennial malaise and twists it: she’s going to take a little break to find herself in a picturesque Austrian mountain town that’s recently been rocked by the arrival of magic. Instead of ski slopes, Hinterberg has dungeons. Surely slaying monsters will help Luisa solve the fear of being in your 20s and not knowing what to do with your life? The bulk of Luisa’s days are spent in dungeons in four different regions, each of which grants Luisa two different magic powers she can use in combat or to solve puzzles. Combat is simple, which works in its favour: there are enough mobs that they could have…

PRICE $50.95 PLATFORM PC, Mac, Meta Quest 2 & 3 WEB cyan.com/games/riven Atrus. Linking books. Ages. Weird, weird, puzzles. Riven, like its prequel Myst, is one of those old games that feels a little familiar – a little revered, even – to just about everyone of a (my) certain age. Going back to the original in the cold light of 2024 is hard: it’s a 640x480 flipbook of a game, much of its original multi-disk awe and wonder lost to time. This remake brings all of the ancient magic back in an instant. At the risk of stating the obvious: this is Riven, but in 3D. And I don’t just mean the old environments, polished domes, and worn machinery are all still there. This is the most successful, spiritually accurate…

Inspirational stories from computing’s long-distant past In summer 1985, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs rebuffed three offers to become a professor. “I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor,” he later revealed in an interview with Newsweek. Yet he still wanted to make a big impact in the education sector. Jobs was 30 years old and ready for a new challenge. He’d resigned from Apple following a reorganisation, but not before telling the board what he wanted to do next. Having previously visited Brown University, he’d been told academics sorely wanted a powerful, personal workstation capable of helping them with their research. His aim, he told the Apple board, was to create a computer for the higher education market that best suited them. When…