Bytes: What’s new in tech
Tech execs question quarantine
A few tech execs have been vocal in their opposition to social distancing, said Julia Carrie Wong and Daniel Strauss in TheGuardian .com. Elon Musk ignored a statewide lockdown and kept Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., plant open last week until police intervened. And Michael Saylor, the CEO of the business intelligence firm Microstrategy, sent an all-staff email asking its 2,000-plus employees to continue coming to the office because social distance was “soul-stealing and debilitating.” Saylor said he believed in the need to “quarantine the 40 million elderly retired, immunecompromised people who no longer need to work or get educated.” “In the absolutely worse case, the overall life expectancy worldwide would click down by a few weeks,” he added. “Instead of 79.60 years to live we would have 79.45 years to live.”
The remote-learning gap
Don’t tell the kids, but all the remote schoolwork they do while quarantined won’t count, said Tawnell Hobbs in The Wall Street Journal. “It’s an equity issue,” said a spokesman for the Seattle public school system. “If you can’t guarantee all your students have online access, nothing’s graded.” That’s why some public schools are referring to online work as “enrichment,” and not part of the curriculum. With 43 million children out of school, “some teachers’ unions have decried school districts rolling out online plans not accessible to all.” In Washington state, at least one school district has already halted the “online model it had rolled out to students to address equity issues.” Instead, “students are being encouraged to create projects that could be useful in the current health situation, such as building a hand-sanitizer dispenser.”
A new $999 MacBook Air
The coronavirus hasn’t stopped Apple from debuting a new device, said Dan Ackerman in CNET.com. Apple has launched a new version of the MacBook Air, returning to the Air’s traditional starting price of $999 for the lower-end model. That “very college student– friendly” price includes 256GB of storage space, up from 128GB, and 8GB of RAM. There’s also a new Magic Keyboard, “a big improvement on the long-suffering butterfly keyboard found in most Macs in recent years.” It’s a major selling point, “and it’s about time” that Apple made the switch. All in all, “more storage, better keyboard, new CPUs, better graphics” are “all welcome upgrades.”