Schools Struggle to Secure Computers

Facing a laptop shortage, some schools have had to jump through hoops to make remote learning work.

Raymond Heller, at his home in North Carolina, received a tablet from his teacher, who was able to get a hold of some through the church where he was a pastor. Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

This period of remote schooling for so many families has made painfully clear the glaring gaps between those who have internet access and those who don’t. But some students also can’t access online classes because a surge in demand for laptops has left many schools and families struggling to find the computers they need.

I spoke with my colleague Kellen Browning, who wrote this week about the burdens from this other digital divide.

Shira: How are schools coping with the lack of available laptops?

Kellen: It’s stressful. Some school districts still haven’t realized how scarce laptops are right now. Others have had to jump on any computer that becomes available.

At the Bonneville School District in eastern Idaho, administrators said they were essentially told by Dell in September that if they placed an order right away, the district could get a couple thousand devices by November. But if they waited, computers might not arrive until February or so. Bonneville administrators scrambled to put together the funding for an order, because they felt it was too important to wait.

Did you find school districts or families with effective workarounds for students who don’t have computers?

There is a district in North Carolina that opened “learning centers” on school property with Wi-Fi and devices, and small numbers of students could occasionally attend. A teacher in that district was able to get a hold of some tablets through the church where he was a pastor. A lot of places were asking for donated devices or they were refurbishing older computers. Some districts were printing out course materials as a last resort. None of this is ideal.

Could schools have done something different to avoid this laptop desert?

Schools could have built stockpiles ahead of time, but the underlying problem is gaps between the rich and poor, and between well-funded and poorly funded school districts. Schools with fewer resources face a double whammy because their students are less likely to have computers and internet access at home, and the districts tend to have less money to buy enough laptops for them.

On the bright side, I guess, a lot of people said they believed the pandemic exposed the problems of this digital divide and created urgency to do something about it.

Is there urgency to close these digital gaps? Remote learning is (hopefully) temporary.

Yes, remote learning may be temporary, but access to reliable internet and devices at home will be essential for kids even when in-person classes resume.

I was struck by a conversation I had with Ashley Wright, a teacher at Pike County Elementary in Zebulon, Ga. She said that she brought an iPad to school one day and showed students Google Earth, which helped them grasp the enormity of the world they live in. For her it drove home the importance of devices and the internet as tools to help understand the world.

The seven words you can never say at Google*

It’s not a good sign when companies bend over backward not to step on legal land mines.

That’s what I thought when I read my colleague Dai Wakabayashi’s surreal article about the ways Google employees are trained not to say or write anything that might suggest the company is an illegal monopoly.

Workers are taught that Google doesn’t “crush,” “kill,” “hurt” or “block” the competition. All could be evidence that the company is breaking antitrust laws. One person interviewing for an executive position got a bad mark for asking about antitrust implications of a potential merger in a follow-up email to Google’s chief executive. Lawyers are copied on even innocuous emails as a way of excluding the messages from prying regulators, Dai reported.

This all seems like oddball antics of a bizarre company. But when companies cross the line between sensible legal caution and this level of hyper vigilance, it can be a red flag.

It was not a good sign when Amazon for years used aggressive tactics to avoid applying sales tax on many U.S. purchases. To make it appear that Amazon wasn’t legally subject to sales tax laws, The Wall Street Journal reported that staff members had to seek permission to enter certain states and were instructed to use special business cards in California that listed their employer as “Amazon Digital Services,” a subsidiary, rather than Amazon itself. (Amazon now collects sales tax on products it sells.)

ProPublica recently wrote about a company that hires at-home customer service representatives and strictly polices the words used to describe the work to emphasize that workers are contractors rather than employees. The workers don’t schedule “hours” but “intervals.” Call-center reps are not “working,” they are “servicing,” ProPublica explained.

All companies worry about legal liability. When you have to go to extreme lengths like requiring words that defy the English language, using fake business cards and writing “ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE” on a team’s bug fixes, something has gone awry.

Gadgets Were on the Way Out. Then 2020 Happened.

A brutally unexpected year turned millions of people into gear nerds, whether they liked it or not.

Gaming consoles and accessories have been in high demand since March. Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

Gadgets were supposed to be over. Smartphones, tablets and smartwatches cannibalized the weaker devices around them, including cameras, music players, navigation units, fitness trackers and gaming devices. The few tech products that broke through the noise of crowdfunding sites and the crowded field of start-ups were quickly commoditized and undercut on Amazon.

The stores that dealt in gadgetry — Circuit City, RadioShack, Best Buy — had gone out of business or become glum warehouses for no-fun products. In 2016, my colleague Farhad Manjoo declared a “gadget apocalypse.”

“For 30 or 40 years, through recessions and war, through stability and revolutions, they were always there,” he wrote. Soon, to the horror of enthusiasts and mere consumerists alike, they might converge into a bland rectangularity.

For now, at least, it appears the gadget apocalypse has been averted, due in part to threats of actual apocalypse. Seven months of shattered plans, lockdowns and rapidly improvised new normals have converted jaded consumers around the world into frantic gadget freaks, each grasping for items that, in their chaotic disparity, tell the story of a strange, dark year: pulse oximeters, the iPhone 12, HEPA air filters, infrared thermometers, bare-minimum tablets and laptops for schooling, the PlayStation 5 (pre-order), ring lights, miniature freezers, home networking equipment, and noise canceling headphones.

“Thermometer guns” are now coveted by businesses and households alike. Carter Johnston for The New York Times

Elements of this gadget boom are more 2002 than 2020. When’s the last time you went comparison shopping for a webcam? How are you enjoying that new inkjet printer? And yet it evokes 2200 as well. Did you expect to spend your summer trying to figure out if an air purifier made by a Bluetooth speaker company was going to be sufficient to clear the atmosphere in your isolation pod on an increasingly hostile planet?

One striking detail of this gadget boom is that the horsemen of the once-inevitable gadget apocalypse have slowed to a trot. Gartner, the research firm and consultancy, estimated that smartphone sales fell by 20 percent in the second quarter of the year, when much of the world was dealing with severe and increasing Covid-19 caseloads and economies in steep decline. There are new game consoles on the horizon, but they’re not yet out; the breakout device in the gaming industry was also the most gadgety of its peers — the three-year-old Nintendo Switch.

Before 2020, many popular consumer electronics were receding into the background, more vital and useful than ever but purchased, wielded and discarded with a sense of routine, rather than novelty. In this way, smartphones are like cars: first, obnoxiously out of place; then, ubiquitous and yet more demanding; finally, taken for granted and made invisible, despite remaking the world around them in increasingly ambitious ways.

The ways in which people buy gadgets, too, have become less distinct and more infrastructural. Product review sites where readers might have compared wireless headphones are recommending, a few links over, home blood oxygen monitoring equipment. A style and language developed by an enthusiast consumer culture is stretching to accommodate new needs. (For a family stretching to get their kids set up for remote learning, “The Best Laptops” is less relevant than “How to Shop for a Used Laptop or Desktop PC.”)

Same with pulse oximeters. Celeste Noche for The New York Times

Nowhere are the disparate experiences of the pandemic gadget boom more obvious than on Amazon, which has mutated from the “everything store” into a global product distribution utility. Wednesday’s selection of featured Prime Day sales seemed COVID-aware: cheap childproof tablets, noise-canceling headphones, an Instant Pot and countless items to furnish a long-haul home office.

The generic Amazon brand, once an accused enemy of gadgetry, is now its accomplice. Companies with forgettable names making forgettable products — brands created to sell low-margin batteries, cables and Bluetooth speakers — have grown into miniature Amazon conglomerates. Smoked-out Californians logging onto Amazon earlier this year might have encountered a well-reviewed option from TaoTronics, which just a few years ago was known almost exclusively for its bargain-basement wireless earbuds (come winter, the brand sells space heaters and therapy lamps, too). Anker, which made its name selling portable batteries on Amazon, would now like to sell you a projector, so that you might open a small movie theater in your home, as the big screens in your town shut down, maybe for good.

The pandemic gadget boom is a story of both new needs fulfilled and old desires restored. Buying noise canceling headphones is, of course, a consumerist treat, setting aside the new circumstances that made them feel necessary — the construction downstairs, the baby 20 feet away, the spouse simultaneously trapped in a video meeting. You can feel the faintest muscle memory activate when you comparison shop for a gadget of a type you’ve never purchased before, even if that gadget is — judging by back orders and top listings on Amazon as the winter creeps closer — a S.A.D. lamp or an outdoor radiator.

Ring lights, previously reserved for the creator class, have become office accessories for workers attending remote meetings. Jake Michaels for The New York Times

This gadget boom will end like every other — with a bunch of little-used and rapidly obsolete junk stowed away in closets and landfills around the globe — but it won’t inspire much nostalgia. This isn’t spontaneous mass hobbyism or a slide into decadence. It’s a cornered populace spending what they can in hopes that some novel invention will stave off disaster, or even just gloom.

The gadgets that were so recently on their way out were of a different variety, and purchased under different circumstances. Gadget consumption has long been portrayed as an interface with some part of the future: options on a shelf from which you can select how, when, or if you want to engage with whatever is coming next. This was always a pleasant illusion, and it’s one the pandemic has made impossible to sustain.

In this brutally unexpected year, the luckiest were buying their way through hard times, sustained by the hope that another purchase might fix a new problem, momentarily re-empowered, if only by tapping another “Confirm” button, and buoyed by the simple, shameful pleasure of acquisition. The rest were coping, meeting sudden demands or simply trying to stay safe, whatever the cost.

Pandemic gadgets don’t bother to lie about being the next big thing. They do not even claim to be a way to catch up with the next big thing. Their guaranteed future obsolescence — perhaps the defining characteristic of a gadget — isn’t something to hide, because when it come to pass, it won’t be a disappointment. It will be a relief.

Schools Struggle to Secure Computers

Gadgets Were on the Way Out. Then 2020 Happened.

What You Need to Know About 5G Smartphones