Month: March 2020

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  Inside the MacBook Air. [credit: iFixit ]

iFixit, a company that sells gadget-repair parts and publishes regular teardowns of popular devices, dug into the new MacBook Air this week and found it to be a slight step-up for MacBooks in terms of repairability.

The site found that the move from the butterfly keyboard to the new scissor-switch one only added “half a millimeter to the thick end of the new Air.” And the site speculates that these keys should be much more reliable, noting that no silicone barrier is needed as it was on the butterfly keyboard to mitigate that design’s problems.

Keyboard aside, the teardown uncovered a larger heartsink for the CPU, plus a couple of things that might make this laptop a bit easier to service than its predecessor.

Enlarge / The camera assembly of the OnePlus 8 Pro. (credit: OnLeaks)

OnePlus has been regularly pumping out the best Android phones for several years now, so soon all eyes will be on the OnePlus 8 Pro, the company's upcoming flagship smartphone for 2020. A pair of recent leaks gives us a look at the official press render and the specs.

First up, OnLeaks has a pair of official press renders of the device. Just like the CAD-based renders that OnLeaks posted back in October, these pictures show a design that isn't far off from previous OnePlus devices, with the big changes being a move to a hole-punch front camera and a new rear camera assembly. The back has four cameras now, an upgrade from the three cameras that were on the back of the OnePlus 7T. The display still looks like it's curved along the sides, too.

The official OnePlus 8 Pro press render, from every angle. (credit: iGeeksBlog)

The second batch of details comes from leaker Ishan Agarwal, who posted a spec sheet for the OnePlus 8 Pro and OnePlus 8. The regular OnePlus 8 sticks close to last year, with a 6.55-inch 90Hz display and an upgrade to the Snapdragon 865. The 8 Pro has about what you would expect from a flagship phone in 2020: a 6.78-inch, 120Hz OLED display, a Snapdragon 865, 8 or 12GB of RAM, 128 or 256GB of storage, and a 4510mAh battery. The front camera is 16MP, while the rear camera has two 48MP cameras, an 8MP camera, and a 5MP camera. We don't know what each camera is for yet.

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

Charter Communications is giving its cable technicians $25 restaurant gift cards instead of hazard pay for going into customer homes during the coronavirus pandemic, BuzzFeed reported yesterday. The gift cards are a "token of our appreciation," an internal email from management on Monday said, BuzzFeed reported. Of course, many restaurants are closed during the pandemic, so restaurant gift cards aren't the most useful perk Charter management could have chosen.

"These gift cards never expire, so if you choose a restaurant that is currently not open, the card will remain valid for future use... Please take some time out of your busy day to enjoy a meal and recharge," the email read.

Several Charter employees did not appreciate the minimal gesture. "It's really insensitive, it shows they don't care," one New York City-based technician told BuzzFeed. "You think a gift card is supposed to make us feel better?"

Enlarge (credit: Gary Norton/DOE)

On Wednesday, the Global Wind Energy Council, an industry trade organization, released its review of the market in 2019. During the past year, wind power saw its second-largest amount of new installed capacity ever, with over 60GW going in. But the news going forward is a bit more uncertain, with the report predicting that after years of double-digit growth, the industry would see things tail off into steady-but-unspectacular territory. And that prediction was made before many key markets started dealing with the coronavirus.

A very good year

Wind power is now one of the cheapest options for generating electricity. In many areas of the globe, building and maintaining wind power is cheaper per unit of power than it is to fuel a previously constructed fossil fuel plant. While offshore wind remains more expensive, its prices have dropped dramatically over the last several years, and it is rapidly approaching price parity with fossil fuels.

But cost isn't the only thing at issue. Renewables may require new transmission lines to feed their power to where people actually live, and managing wind's intermittent nature may require grid upgrades once its percentage gets high enough. And due to the past successes of wind, a significant number of the best sites are now already in use in some regions. Given those issues, it can be difficult to justify shutting down power plants that may have decades of service left in their expected lifespan. This is especially true in fully industrialized countries, where total electricity use has been trending downward, largely due to gains in energy efficiency.