Month: March 2020

Enlarge / No need to use hand sanitizer after handling a download (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Update (3/21/2020 8:45pm ET): Gamestop has announced that it will be closing all its stores to regular walk-in customers starting Sunday, March 22. Customers will still be able to use a curbside pickup option at certain stores to receive purchases, or use standard shipping options from the GameStop web site.

"As millions of Americans look to GameStop to adjust to their new normal of increased time at home, for work, learning and play, we have implemented practices to help ensure the safety and health of our employees, customers and partners," GameStop CEO George Sherman said in a statement. "We believe it is prudent to institute further safety protocols while meeting this increased demand through curbside pick-up.  As such, stores that remain in operation will provide only pick-up at the door or delivery to home activities to further protect our employees and customers.”

The company has pledged to pay employees affected by the closure for an additional two weeks, and to provide employee benefit contributions for a month.

Enlarge / Charles Leclerc's Ferrari at the 2019 Singapore Grand Prix. (credit: Ferrari)

One of the big stories in F1 during the latter half of the 2019 season concerned exactly what Scuderia Ferrari was doing to get so much power out of its engine. Its cars were undoubtedly the fastest in a straight line for much of the year, although a "technical clarification" issued in November by the FIA—the sport's governing body—coincided with a drop off in the Italian team's speed.

Things got a little more interesting in February of this year, when the FIA announced that it had reached an agreement with Ferrari following an investigation into the matter. The announcement was more than a little cryptic, and part of the agreement with the team was a condition that while Ferrari wouldn't do it again, exactly what "it" was will remain a secret. The 2020 F1 season is on hold thanks to the coronavirus, but if the cars do get back on track this year, they'll do so with a new sensor that's designed to prevent a possible repeat of last year's shenanigans.

It’s only cheating if you get caught

When the F1 rule book changed in 2014, ushering in the current era of expensive, complicated, and overweight F1 cars, some of the regulations were meant to make the cars more fuel-efficient. One rule limits the cars to no more than 100kg of fuel during the race, and a second restricts the rate at which that fuel can be pumped into the engine, which can't exceed 100kg/hr. (F1 measures fuel by weight, since the volume of the liquid can change depending on ambient temperature and air pressure.)

Enlarge (credit: Robyn Beck/Pool via Bloomberg|Getty Images)

The San Francisco Bay Area is in lockdown to fight the spread of the coronavirus. Under a "shelter in place" order announced Monday, people in seven Bay Area counties are prohibited from leaving their homes except for essential activities like visiting the doctor or buying food.

Tesla's Fremont car factory is in Alameda County, which is participating in the lockdown. But Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been defiant. In a Monday evening email, he told employees that they could stay home from work if they felt sick. However, he wrote, "I will personally be at work" on Tuesday.

But late on Tuesday, the Alameda County Sheriff's office fired a shot across Tesla's bow:

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  [credit: Apple ]

Apple's 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro tablets got major updates today. Most notably, Apple added a totally new dual-camera system with a lidar scanner, confirming rumors that the company would bring a time-of-flight (ToF) sensor to the device to improve the accuracy and speed of augmented reality (AR) applications.

Additionally, the iPad Pro has a new system-on-a-chip called the A12Z (not the A13X like previous nomenclature suggested). Among other things, it has an 8-core GPU that promises 2.6x faster graphics performance than the A10X and a more modest improvement over the A12X. Apple says the new iPad Pro has an enhanced thermal design as well.

That new rear-camera array has a 12MP (ƒ/1.8 aperture) wide-angle camera, plus a 10MP (ƒ/2.4) ultra-wide angle camera with a 125-degree field of view. Like the new iPhone 11 models from late last year, the ultra-wide enables a 2x optical out shooting mode. Since there's no telephoto lens, though, it only supports digital zoom. Both the wide and ultra-wide lenses can record 4K video at 60 frames per second.

Enlarge / NEWTON, MA - MARCH 17: Medical professionals work in coronavirus testing tents at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Newton, MA on March 17, 2020. (credit: Boston Globe)

As the number of detected COVID-19 cases in the US nears 6,500 and deaths reached 115 on March 18, healthcare workers are already being hit hard by the pandemic sweeping the country.

Dozens have fallen ill and many more are in quarantine. At least two emergency physicians are in critical condition.

“I am deeply saddened by this news, but not surprised,” William Jaquis, President of the American College of Emergency Physicians said in a statement. “This virus is dangerous, and its impact is still unfolding. As emergency physicians, we answer the call to care for our most vulnerable, even at great personal risk.”

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  The 2020 MacBook Air. [credit: Apple ]

Today, Apple announced new MacBook Air models that incorporate the non-butterfly keyboard introduced in the 16-inch MacBook Pro in November. The company also bumped up the specs, doubled the storage, and put the entry-level price at $999—something onlookers have called on Apple to do for a long time.

Apple calls the new keyboard the Magic Keyboard because it is closely modeled after the Magic Keyboard peripheral the company has sold for years. It has been introduced to the MacBook Air after a positive reception on the MacBook Pro in the wake of the divisive and failure-prone butterfly mechanism the company used in both computers for prior iterations.

Even more notably, Apple has brought the entry-level price for the MacBook Air down to $999 (it started at $1,199 when this chassis was first introduced in 2018). The $999 model has a 1.1GHz, dual-core, 10th generation Intel Core i3 CPU with a 4MB L3 cache, 8GB of 3,733MHz LPDDR4X RAM, and 256GB of storage (twice as much storage as the previous entry-level model). At the higher end of the configuration options, you can opt for a 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU (also 10th gen) with an 8MB cache and up to 2TB of SSD storage.