Ref got it wrong? Now you can whip out your phone and tell them so, in slow motion. (I’m sure they’ll love that.)
Samsung reckons it has the answer, and it may already in your pocket. A few clever features on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, and to a lesser extent the rest of the Galaxy S family, are being positioned as the great sideline peacekeeper:
Space Zoom, the 100x zoom found on the S26 Ultra, lets you zoom in close enough to settle exactly whose foot did what to whom, and where the ball actually ended up. Perfect for refereeing from forty metres away with the confidence of someone who definitely didn’t see it properly the first time.
If it all happens too fast for the human eye, Instant Slow-mo uses AI to generate extra frames and slow the action right down, so you can relive that contested handball in glorious, undeniable detail.
Super Steady (motion stabilisation) and Horizontal Lock keep your footage level even while you’re sprinting down the sideline for a better angle. The footage stays smooth. Your dignity, less so.
Samsung’s even floated the idea that the S26 Ultra could double as a pocket VAR, or video assistant referee – timely given how much the real VAR is already being talked about at The World Cup!
To see it in action, check out Samsung’s video featuring Archie Thompson, former Socceroo from the golden era of 2006, and a team of very enthusiastic kids from Sutherland Sharks FC.
Every time someone from a tech company has discussed the increasing prices of hardware, they’ve followed a pretty similar playbook. Vague, general references to the global memory shortage, followed by a boilerplate reason as to why the only option is to pass costs onto consumers. It’s why Valve’s confirmation of the Steam Machine’s pricing was so interesting; rather than give an empty, corporate-speak-filled response, as many have done before, it went into refreshing detail about the company’s price strategy.
Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.
This last sentence is something that’s all too familiar to tech and gaming enthusiasts right now. Usually, early adopters would pay the most to be the first to have a new device. After a while, prices would come down, as components and manufacturing get cheaper. However, the opposite is currently happening.
As a quick refresher, the major investments in generative AI technology, namely the data centres required to power the technology at scale, have resulted in huge demand for components. Memory and storage are crucial to data centre operations, causing companies to buy up not only existing stock, but also future allocations yet to be produced.
This leads to the next part of Valve’s explanation:
Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months.
Price wasn’t the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn’t source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we’ve been able to produce for launch.
It’s a remarkable level of transparency rarely seen from a tech (or tech-adjacent) company. Valve confirms the problem faced by every tech manufacturer right now: cost and availability.
Apple’s outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, recently claimed that “price increases are unavoidable”. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he described the squeeze on the tech supply chain as something he’d “never seen anything like” in his 40-plus-year career, labelling it a “hundred-year-flood” event.
While Cook didn’t elaborate as much as Valve’s statement (unattributed to any individual author), it was a rare show of candour from a Silicon Valley executive. Most of what gets said on public record only refers to broad concepts, likely in an attempt to avoid ceding any competitive advantages when negotiating hardware deals with suppliers. Even Cook’s statement, as enlightening as it was for contextualising the tech industry’s challenges, was scant on specifics.
Conversely, Valve revealed just how much the memory shortage is playing havoc with device launches, in both timing and pricing. When you look at a new phone, PC, or games console on a retailer’s shelf, you likely wouldn’t consider how many months’ worth of components the company had to secure, and at what cost, to arrive at the price indicated on the sticker.
An important distinction to make here is that Valve is a private company. It’s not beholden to appeasing shareholders and investors. Valve’s top priority is keeping its paying customers on board, hence the transparency.
Regardless, no amount of transparency makes it easier to shell out thousands of dollars for a device that would’ve been cheaper just a short few years ago.
The battle to get people to come back to the cinema has been a tough one. Hoyts’ latest not-so-secret weapon in this war is to offer a wider variety of screen and chair technologies. At the centre of this strategy is Hoyts Apex, a massive screen that uses LED technology instead of traditional cinema projectors.
Apex joins several other technologies Hoyts is pinning its hopes on, including D-Box, IMAX, and ScreenX. Hoyts Melbourne Central is one of the latest locations to get the big LED screen, with tickets costing $34 for adults and $28.50 for children.
At an early first look at the new cinema screen, Hoyts executives explained how it fits with the chain’s overall plans. With the cinema industry still rebuilding after COVID disruptions, in addition to the availability of streaming services, Hoyts still boasts a 30 per cent market share in the cinema space, and three million registered rewards members across Australia and New Zealand.
According to the Hoyts executives, 2026 has been a good year so far, claiming an increase of 31 per cent in the year to date. They didn’t specify whether that figure was revenue, ticket sales, or attendance, but were confident that people are getting back to cinemas. It’s hoped that major new technologies, like Hoyts Apex, will keep that trend going.
Hoyts Apex brings big and bright to the cinema
Apex is the most interesting new technology to come to Hoyts. It’s an absolutely massive LED screen. In Melbourne, it’s 21 metres wide, 10 metres tall, with the one in Perth maxing out to a massive 25m wide, both featuring a 2.31 aspect ratio.
The screen itself is made up of modular cabinets. Each cabinet holds 10 smaller modules, with each module made up of 5,148 LEDs, for an impressive total of 17 million LEDs across the whole screen. Each module can be taken out and repaired or replaced individually in Australia, reducing any possible downtime should a few pixels die. Melbourne Central also has 100 spare modules on hand, just in case.
A close-up view of the LEDs. Image: Alice Clarke.
The panels themselves are flat, but the screen itself has a gentle curve, less than a gaming monitor, but enough to further immerse the viewer in the film.
The benefits of Apex are quite significant: there’s basically no maintenance required (beyond occasionally tweezing out a broken LED to replace it), they last longer than a traditional cinema projector, it marks an end to people blocking the projector’s beam if they have to get up midway through the movie, and the screen is brighter, allowing for whiter whites.
Perth also has a Hoyts Apex cinema, located in Karrinyup. Image: Supplied.
With a 6,000-nit peak brightness, the screen supports HDR, while the audio setup supports Dolby Atmos. There’s no light bleed from the screen technology itself, though there can be some baked into the content (as I discovered in The Devil Wears Prada 2). However, reds do seem to be a bit washed out on it, from what I’ve seen.
Overall, it’s a pretty incredible screen technology, and the experience of watching a film on it is excellent.
Everything’s bigger on IMAX
Everyone by now is very familiar with the bigger, taller screens of IMAX, with more films having sequences natively filmed on IMAX cameras. One of the most notable is The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film shot entirely for IMAX.
This is paired with IMAX laser projectors and IMAX sound to make the experience more immersive. The demo at Melbourne Central certainly showed off how impressive the setup is, and I’m really looking forward to seeing The Odyssey on those screens.
D-Box gets your chair moving
The technology with the funniest name is D-Box. These motion recliners have been rolled out at more than 30 cinemas across the country so far, and they move and vibrate to match the action on the screen.
It’s not as intense as one of those 4D Cinema rides you get at theme parks, but if that’s what you were imagining, you’re on the right track. The chairs pitch, roll and vibrate in sync, which makes them a perfect match for action films.
Images: Alice Clarke.
Surprisingly, a friend of mine saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 in the D-Box and reported that it actually heightened the emotional intensity of the film. It also made her more aware of vehicles that passed by on screen (stay tuned for more thoughts on The Sapphic AV Club podcast).
For those who aren’t up for the full intensity of the D-Box, there are individual controls for each seat that can be adjusted throughout the film. It’s also a fully cushioned comfort recliner, so you can be comfortable while experiencing the action.
ScreenX stretches the limits
I must admit, I do not see the point of ScreenX in its current form. It’s a square room with a regular (albeit) cinema screen in front, and then screens on the walls to the left and right. The effect is very impressive and immersive. I can see it being a place where things filmed for Apple Vision Pro might be screened to the masses.
But the way it was shown to us was with a clip from Project Hail Mary, with the left and rightmost 10 per cent of the screen stretched into oblivion on the side walls. It had the potential to be cool, but instead it was just distracting.
Image: Alice Clarke.
If the footy finals can be filmed in a way that takes advantage of the side walls, or a concert perhaps, I can see it being amazing. But for the use case we were shown, it was pretty unpleasant. The seats were comfy, and the popcorn was delicious. But those stretched sides… hoo boy.
While all of these new cinema technologies are installed at Hoyts Melbourne Central, they can be found spread around the Hoyts network of cinemas, with more expected to be renovated soon.
Valve has finally confirmed the price for its eagerly awaited Steam Machine, a gaming PC that runs SteamOS, designed to provide a more streamlined, console-like experience. Except that its $1,609 starting price in Australia is distinctly un-console-like.
With listings for the device now live online, the Steam Machine comes in a few different configurations. One is just the PC with 512GB of internal storage, which carries the aforementioned $1,609 price tag locally. If you want a Steam Controller, too, you can bundle it in at a total cost of $1,728, which is $30 cheaper than buying the gamepad outright.
Need more storage? The only other configuration for now is 2TB, costing Australians $2,109. Similarly, there’s also a Steam Controller-inclusive bundle, retailing for $2,228. 512GB won’t go too far with modern games, many of which exceed 100GB install sizes. However, courtesy of the global memory shortage, components like RAM and storage cost an absolute mint right now.
Valve even admitted to Eurogamer that the Steam Machine price is “significantly more” than what the company originally had in mind. Lawrence Yang, who worked on the Steam Machine’s user interface, also confirmed that Valve produced “less than we wanted to be able to make” of the PC, contributing to a lottery-style buying system at launch.
No guarantees of buying a Steam Machine
To even get a Steam Machine in the first place, prospective buyers need to sign up for a list for the model they want to buy. Fortunately, it’s not a first-come, first-served system, with sign-ups open until 3:00 AM on Friday, 26 June, Sydney time.
From there, Valve will determine who can buy one via a “one-time randomisation”. Aussies who make the cut will receive an email on 26 June, confirming a Steam Machine reservation. Anyone else will be added to a waitlist.
In an effort to weed out scalpers, Valve requires potential buyers to have made a purchase on their Steam account before 27 April. As confirmed on Valve’s FAQs, each region also has a separate sign-up list, including Australia.
As for the price, Valve is one of many to feel the pinch of global economics. When it increased the price of the Steam Deck last month, the company cited “the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole.”
Today, Valve further clarified how it landed on the price of the Steam Machine, explaining that component shortages and increased costs had an impact.
“The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable,” Valve’s statement said.
While the company didn’t specify what price it originally planned for, it’s certainly far from being the only brand to have plans upended by the current state of hardware manufacturing.
Phones may not be as cheap as they once were, but you can still score a bargain by waiting for the right time. EOFY sales are one of those times, especially if you want a decent-priced Android handset. Case in point, Motorola currently has up to $600 off some of its best phones, including its flagship contender.
That $600 discount applies to the Motorola Edge 60 Pro, which costs a cool $599 at Australian retailers, including JB Hi-Fi. Moto’s top-end phone from last year sports one heck of a 6,000mAh battery. It impressed me during testing, as did the phone’s sharp cameras. At full price, the phone’s three years of OS updates were disappointing, but for $599, there’s little to complain about.
Also discounted during the EOFY sales is the Motorola Signature, which is $200 off. Down to $1,299 for the 256GB model, it goes toe-to-toe with Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S26 devices, coming out on top in some areas. I loved the camera quality on this thing; you’d be hard-pressed to find anything better in this price bracket.
Budget-conscious shoppers can breathe easy, with several deals on the affordable G-series phones, too. Through Telstra, you can grab the Moto G56 for $199 or the Moto G67 for $349, with discounts of $200 and $150, respectively. The $300 discount on the Motorola Edge 70 is also pretty good, too, netting you a decent mid-range Android phone for $599.
Here’s the full range of discounted Motorola phones, currently on sale until 30 June:
Tax time is approaching once again, so prepare yourself for the annual deluge of EOFY sales. As per usual, it’s a pretty good time to upgrade any aging hardware or splurge on a new gadget while it’s on sale. This year’s EOFY deals include a bunch of discounts across phones, computers, and smart home gear — walk into any tech retailer, and you’ll see an endless sea of sale stickers.
Depending on what you’re in the market for, you might also be able to claim some purchases on tax. It all depends on what you use your tech for, of course, so keep your receipts and chat with an accountant to see what you can claim.
Even if you don’t grab anything work-related, the EOFY sales are still a good chance to nab a deal on some tech you were eyeing off anyway.
You’ve got about a week to browse the 2026 EOFY sales, so take a look at some of the tech that’s caught our eyes. Stay tuned as we update this article throughout the week with more deals.
EOFY 2026 deals: Phones, tablets, and mobile accessories
Grab a Motorola phone for up to $600 off
Motorola Signature Image: Motorola.
If you want a well-priced Android phone during the EOFY 2026 sales, Motorola has some good options. There’s $200 off the flagship Motorola Signature, and a whopping $600 off last year’s Edge 60 Pro model, while the mid-range Edge 70 is a healthy $300 off. Some phones, including the Moto G56 and Moto G67, are discounted when bought outright from Telstra during the telco’s EOFY sales, too.
Get up to $1,100 off Roborock robot and wet-dry vacuums
Qrevo Curv 2 Flow. Image: Roborock.
Need a bit of help keeping things clean? There’s no shortage of discounted robot vacuum cleaners during the 2026 EOFY sales, with Roborock one of the brands leading the charge. One of the top picks is the Qrevo Curv 2 Flow, a robot with a roller mop that outperforms many others when it comes to hard floor cleaning.
Save up to $500 on Tineco wet-dry vacuums and carpet cleaners
Tineco’s Floor One S9 Artist Steam cleaner is on sale during EOFY. Image: Tineco.
Among the many discounted Tineco carpet and wet-dry cleaners is a rare deal on the Floor One S9 Artist Steam. As its lengthy name suggests, this model uses high-temperature steam technology to clean up any nasties left on your floor. It’s one of our favourite wet-dry vacuums, and it also happens to be $400 off at the moment.
We’re big fans of Reolink’s smart home security range, which doesn’t lean heavily into subscriptions to power its best features. One of the top models is the Altas PT Ultra, a 4K security camera that supports 24/7 recording, supported by a solar panel, so you don’t need to worry about recharging batteries.
It’s hard to go past a solid mid-range laptop. Sure, it doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the laptop that costs the same as a car, or the allure of a very low-end price tag. But the mid-range is where the magic happens. It’s the Goldilocks of laptops, if you will.
The Gigabyte Gaming A16 CWH laptop is in the middle of the mid-tier gaming laptops. It’s not going to set your world on fire, and there have been some weird choices made that have held it back unnecessarily, but it’ll get the job done while making sure you have a good time.
The first thing that struck me was how light this laptop is. I’m used to 16-inch gaming laptops being something you could kill someone with, but this appears to be a laptop designed to be carried around without destroying your spine. At 2.2kg, it’s not nothing, but it’s also not as intense as my usual 2023 Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, and I appreciated that.
Image: Alice Clarke.
Set up was pretty much exactly what you’d expect. I got out the charger and set it up as I would any Windows laptop: logging into my accounts and then waiting 1,000 years for updates to complete. Overall, a very uneventful setup.
1x DC-in 1x RJ-45 1x HDMI 2.1 2x Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 1 1x Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 1 1x Type-A USB 2.0 Gen 1 (DisplayPort 1.4 and Power Delivery 3.0 support) 1 x 3.5mm audio jack
Wireless connectivity
Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.2
Battery
Li-ion 76Wh – estimated battery life 14 hours
There are a few interesting things to call out here. The first is the battery life of “up to” 14 hours. You will probably not actually ever get 14 hours, but you will get more hours than most gaming laptops, depending on what you’re doing. I’m quite impressed by the battery life. The second is that this is one of the cheapest laptops I could find in stores in Australia with an RTX 5070 laptop GPU.
What’s weird is the 85W for the total graphics power (TGP), because that is not enough to get the most out of an RTX 5070. Why put an RTX 5070 in there and then hobble it? It’s an odd choice and not one I would have made. It means that the graphics won’t perform as well as a 5070 in a different laptop with more TGP.
Benchmarks
Geekbench 6 single-core
Geekbench 6 multi-core
Geekbench 6 OpenCL score
3D Mark Steel Nomad
Gigabyte Gaming A16 CWH
2,357
10,532
110,320
2,552
These are quite respectable numbers for this price range. Looking at the Geekbench browser numbers, you could get a little extra power out of the AMD version of the A16 (which also sells for the same price) on single-core performance, but it’s not as powerful on multi-core scores.
Some similarly priced laptops in other markets can get you a little more power, due to a higher TGP. Still, it’s decent for a laptop you can get for less than $2,000.
Gaming
If you have bought a gaming laptop, chances are you want to play games. My experience was largely positive, with a few caveats.
On a less demanding game like Fortnite, I could put the game on max graphics settings and then play with a decent 120-144fps. Trying to push it beyond that frame rate was possible; I could hit 200fps on occasion, but it turned the graphics into a pixelated soup, which was deeply unpleasant. The FHD IPS screen isn’t capable of displaying much more than 144fps anyway, so there’s no point in pushing it.
I did get the occasional screen tear and some irritating lag.
But Forza Horizon 6, Ball X Pit and Fortnite looked excellent, even if there were times I was afraid the laptop would fly away with the fans spinning that fast and loud.
Unfortunately, gaming without headphones isn’t an option. The built-in speakers just do not go loud enough to counter the loud fans. The speakers also sounded bad, had terrible clarity, and the bass was so muddy that it was almost better to play on mute than with them on.
It’s a good IPS screen, though. Decent range of colours and excellent FHD definition. You wouldn’t want it for colour grading or graphic design or to use in bright sunlight (it doesn’t get very bright), but Gigabyte has made reasonable concessions to keep the cost lower.
Day-to-day use
This is a laptop that isn’t dripping in ‘I’m a gamer and don’t get hugged enough’ edgy aesthetics and RGB lighting. The keyboard lights up, because of course it does, but this is a laptop that wouldn’t look out of place in a boardroom or university. The lack of power to the graphics card is a crime for gaming, but not the end of the world for running architectural software or doing things with AI. It means that this is a laptop for people with well-rounded interests, which isn’t a bad thing.
Images: Alice Clarke.
The typing experience on it is excellent. I really like the feel of the keyboard. The trackpad is a little unwieldy, and I found myself wanting to use a separate mouse more than I usually do on a laptop, but it’s not a deal-breaker.
What might be a deal-breaker is only having one USB-C port on the laptop. Having three USB-A ports in 2026 is nice (even if one of them is only USB 2.0), but only one USB-C? In this port economy? That’s a really weird call.
Image: Alice Clarke.
Who is the Gigabyte Gaming A16 (CWH) laptop for?
This is a solid mid-range laptop for someone who wants to be able to play games when they choose, but doesn’t live and breathe games. It’s also a solid choice for people who do graphically intensive tasks and need the specs of a gaming laptop, without wanting the aesthetics of one.
Looking around Centre Com and JB Hi-Fi, I couldn’t find another gaming laptop with an RTX 5070 card in the same price bracket at all (aside from the AMD version of the same laptop). So, if you want a gaming laptop with a 5070 card, and don’t want to spend well over $2,500, this is the best (and only) option at the moment.
Gigabyte Gaming A16 (CWH)
The Gigabyte Gaming A16 (CWH) laptop is a solid mid-range laptop for people who want to be able to play games, but also still want to be able to take the laptop to school or work.
