What’s the difference between a stupid idea and a brilliant one? Sometimes, it just comes down to resources. Practically unlimited funds, like limitless thrust, can get even a mad idea off the ground.

And so it might be for the concept of putting AI data centers in orbit. In a rare moment of unalloyed agreement, some of the richest and most powerful men in technology are staunchly backing the idea. The group includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. In all likelihood, hundreds of people are now working on the concept of space data centers at the firms directly or indirectly controlled by these men—SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Amazon, Blue Origin, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Google, among others.

Likely costs to design, build, and launch a 1-GW orbital datacenter, based on a network of some 4,400 satellites and including operating costs over a five-year period, would exceed US $50 billion. That’s about three times the cost of a 1-GW data center on Earth, including five years of operation.John MacNeill

So how much would it cost to start training large language models in space? Probably the best accounting is one created by aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip. McCalip’s exhaustive, detailed analysis includes interactive sliders that let you compare costs for space-based and terrestrial data centers in the range of 1 to 100 gigawatts. One-gigawatt data centers are being built now on terra firma, and Meta has announced plans for a 5-GW facility, with anticipated completion some time after 2030.

In an interview, McCalip says his initial rough calculations a few years ago suggested that data centers in space would cost in the range of 7 to 10 times more, per gigawatt of capacity, than their terrestrial counterparts. “It just wasn’t practical,” he says. “Not even close.” But when Elon Musk began publicly backing the idea, McCalip revisited the numbers using publicly available information about Starlink’s and Tesla’s technologies and capabilities.

That changed the picture substantially. The figures in his online analysis assume an orbital network of data-center satellites that borrows heavily from Musk’s tech treasure chest—“essentially…you just start putting some radiation-resistant ASIC chips on the Starlink fleet and you start growing edge capacity organically on the Starlink fleet,” McCalip says. The network would rely on the kind of watt-efficient GPU architecture used in Teslas for self-driving, he adds. “You start dropping those onto the backs of Starlinks. You can slowly grow this out, and this would be approximately the performance that you would get.”

Bottom line, with some solid but not necessarily heroic engineering, the cost of an orbital data center could be as low as three times that of the comparable terrestrial one. That differential, while still high, at least nudges the concept out of the instantly dismissible category. “I have my particular views, but I want the data to speak for itself,” McCalip says.

For this illustration, we picked a configuration with an aggregate 1 GW of capacity. The network would consist of some 4,300 satellites, each of which would be outfitted with a 1-square-kilometer solar array that generates 250 kilowatts. The data center on that satellite, powered by the array, might have at least 175 GPUs; McCalip notes that a popular GPU rack, Nvidia’s NVL72, has 72 GPUs and requires 120 to 140 kW.

The total cost of the satellite network would be around US $51 billion, including launch and five years of operational expenses; a comparable terrestrial system would cost about $16 billion over the same period.

Stupid? Not stupid? You decide.

This is a sponsored article brought to you by Audio Precision.

Bluetooth started as a simple wireless connection between a phone and a headset. Since its inception, it has become the invisible scaffolding for music, calls, gaming, and hearing assistance across consumer and professional devices alike. Bluetooth’s evolution to support more use cases has been driven not by a single breakthrough but by a steady accumulation of radio innovations, codecs, transport schemes, and power management strategies that together enhance the user experience with wireless audio. Today, a new architectural baseline—Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio—promises low-power, high quality, and scalable audio delivery to open up the standard for an even wider range of applications [1][2].

Evolution of Bluetooth Radio Technologies

The original Basic Rate (BR) radio introduced with Bluetooth 1.0 in 1999 used a Gaussian frequency-shift keying (GFSK) at 1 Msym/s, hopping through 79 channels in the 2.4 GHz band with alternating transmission directions in a tight time-division duplex rhythm. The short-range robustness and reliability afforded by this technology helped gain performance at par with traditional cable-based devices.

In 2003, the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) arrived as the enabling standard for stereo audio streaming over Bluetooth Classic, marking the technology’s expansion beyond voice into music playback. A2DP uses the Audio/Video Distribution Transport Protocol (AVDTP) for stream management and mandates the Sub-Band Codec (SBC) as its baseline audio compression format. The SBC codec employs 4- or 8-band analysis/synthesis filter banks with adaptive bit allocation, spanning bitrates from 128 to 345 kbps for stereo content. Embedded DSP work showed how to optimize SBC implementation—Weighted Overlap Add (WOLA) filter banks, fixed-point pipelines, and real-time decoding that is audibly indistinguishable from floating point reference implementations while consuming fewer MIPS and milliwatts [3].

In 2004, Bluetooth 2.0 introduced Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) that moved payloads to π/4 DQPSK or 8 DPSK modulation to boost gross throughput to 2–3 Mb/s, while retaining the GFSK for packet headers. This innovation boosted stereo streaming quality and adoption during the decade.

Around 2010, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 1 M PHY technology was introduced via Bluetooth 4.0. This new radio technology continued to use GFSK but tuned for low duty cycles and intermittent bursts. This fundamental difference with BR/EDR (Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate) led to common usage of the term “Bluetooth Classic” for Bluetooth 1.0 to distinguish it from BLE.

Isochronous Transport Architecture

In late 2016, Bluetooth 5.0 introduced the LE 2M PHY, doubling the symbol rate to 2 Msym/s. For a healthy link margin, halving a packet’s airtime was found to reduce collision exposure and lower the energy delivered/bit. By 2020, Bluetooth 5.2 or Bluetooth LE Audio radically shifted the focus from continuous streaming to a transport designed explicitly around deadlines. LE (Low Energy) Audio leverages the existing LE 1M and LE 2M PHYs but carries audio over isochronous channels—slots with timing commitments. The isochronous channel architecture comes in two forms. Connected Isochronous Streams (CIS) are unicast flows whose parameters (intervals, subevents, retransmissions) can be tuned to meet frame deadlines with bounded jitter, enabling the radio to sleep predictably between bursts while the application knows precisely when a frame will arrive. A systematic review of BLE performance corroborates that output and latency in the real world are bounded as much by connection interval, event length, and retransmissions as by the raw symbol rate; under the right parameters, faster PHYs reduce radioactive time and improve energy efficiency, while coded long-range modes trade airtime for robustness in harsher channels [1].

Broadcast Isochronous Streams (BIS)—commercially branded as Auracast—extend that scheduling to one-to-many transmissions, enabling connectionless audio delivery to unlimited receivers [2][7].

This difference in architecture over continuous streams requires careful selection of intervals, packetization, codec forming and appropriate models to determine parameters that meet deadlines without wasting airtime. Markov chain analyses of CIS—validated via simulation—translate developer choices (intervals, subevents, retransmission counts) into quantitative predictions for packet loss rate (PLR), backlog, delay, throughput, and average power consumption. [7]

The LC3 Codec Advantage

LE Audio’s Low Complexity Communication Codec (LC3) fundamentally shifts the bitrate-quality-complexity balance. Peer-reviewed listening tests across speech and music demonstrate that LC3 delivers superior perceived quality compared with SBC and mSBC at roughly half the bitrate; it also provides robust packet loss concealment and flexible frame sizes, including low-latency modes that make the encoding delay a smaller slice of the end‑to-end budget [2]. The benefits are practical: lower bitrate shrinks airtime, which reduces collision risk; shorter frames pair cleanly with CIS scheduling so deadlines are easier to meet; the codec’s computational footprint is modest enough for miniature devices [2].

Audio Precision provides high-performance audio analyzers, accessories, and applications that have helped engineers worldwide design, validate, characterize, and manufacture audio products for over 40 years.

Hearing Aids: Power-Constrained Wireless Audio

Modern hearing devices are a complex assembly of multiple microphones, digital signal processors, and miniature power sources. Except for Completely-in-Canal (CIC) and Invisible-in-Canal (IIC) designs, which are so small they fit entirely within the ear canal, most hearing aids incorporate two or more microphones to support directional processing, beamforming, and noise reduction. Audio output is provided by a single electro-acoustic transducer. The compact form factor severely limits battery capacity, making energy efficiency critical.

Compared to Bluetooth Classic (A2DP/HFP), LE Audio improves energy efficiency through three broad mechanisms: the LC3 codec achieves equivalent perceived audio quality at significantly lower bitrates than the SBC codec used in Bluetooth Classic; the LE 1M and 2M PHYs reduce on-air time per packet relative to BR/EDR; and Connected Isochronous Streams (CIS) enable precise scheduling, allowing the radio to sleep between transmissions, whereas BR/EDR audio requires longer active radio periods.

BLE‑compliant wake‑up receivers (WuRx) monitor the air with micro/nano-watt sensitivity and trigger the main radio with packet preambles. Reported designs demonstrate sensitivity to extremely weak radio signals (down to −80 dBm), with within‑bit duty cycling that trades latency for power from hundreds of microseconds to seconds [4]. Sleep scheduling techniques primarily apply heuristics for periodic check‑ins, event‑driven wake-ups, clustering, and time division to stretch lifetime while meeting QoS targets [5][6].

From True Wireless Stereo to Coordinated Sets

Bluetooth Classic’s A2DP supports only a single audio stream. In Bluetooth Classic’s True Wireless Stereo (TWS) devices, one earbud acts as the primary, receiving the stereo stream from the phone and relaying audio to the secondary earbud—a forwarding or relay architecture. The additional transmission hop adds latency to the secondary earbud, while increasing power consumption in the primary.

LE Audio eliminates this limitation entirely. The technology’s dual CIS capability lets the phone send synchronized left and right streams directly to both earbuds. This architectural shift enables independent CIS connections from the phone to the left and right earbuds or hearing aids, enabling synchronized stereo delivery without relaying.

Discovery and pairing have evolved to match multi‑device use. The Coordinated Set Identification Service (CSIS) allows two earbuds—or two hearing aids—to be discovered and managed as a coordinated set rather than independently, with resolvable identifiers and set‑level locks. While peer‑reviewed empirical literature on CSIS is thin, timing and carrier synchronization theory is mature: clock‑offset estimation, jitter control, phase‑locked loops, buffer alignment, and recovery strategies hold binaural timing within tens of milliseconds for lip‑sync and spatial imaging [9].

Gaming Headsets: Low Latency With Bidirectional Stereo

Gaming represents a demanding stress test for wireless audio. Bluetooth Classic’s Headset Profile (HSP) and Hands-Free Profile (HFP) support bidirectional audio for voice communication but are fundamentally limited: they transmit only in mono with a maximum sampling rate of 16 kHz, restricting both spatial audio quality and voice fidelity.

LE Audio Unicast Voice transforms this scenario by supporting stereo audio with sampling rates up to 32 kHz, significantly improving spatial audio and speech quality for gaming while maintaining voice communication with other players. End‑to‑end latency often must stay under a few tens of milliseconds for responsive play and coherent spatial sound. LC3’s shorter frames and lower bitrates shrink codec delay; tuned CIS parameters preserve deadlines while limiting retransmissions to useful values; beamforming improves capture quality for bidirectional voice without ballooning computational cost [2][7].

Audio Precision’s new Bluetooth® 5 module provides an interface to audio devices using the latest version of the Bluetooth specification, including LE Audio devices utilizing Unicast and Auracast™. Adobe Stock

Public Broadcast Audio: Auracast

Bluetooth Classic supports only one active audio connection and typically provides a range of approximately 10 meters, making it fundamentally unsuitable for broadcast scenarios such as lecture halls, churches, gyms, and airports.

LE Audio introduces the Broadcast Isochronous Stream (BIS), commercially branded as Auracast, enabling true one-to-many audio transmission. Multiple hearing aids, headphones, and earbuds can receive the same broadcast, which may be public (e.g., airport announcements) or private (encrypted, non-discoverable, optional password protection). Typical Auracast ranges extend up to 30 meters indoors and 100 meters outdoors, depending on environment and configuration.

BIS’s connectionless nature scales easily to unlimited receivers without pairing overhead; isochronous delivery tolerates packet loss well through forward error correction and interleaving; and the unidirectional transmission eliminates return traffic, reducing radio congestion. Assistive listening studies report that bypassing room acoustics and delivering audio directly can improve signal‑to‑noise ratios by 15–20 dB, making announcements comprehensible and lectures clearer [8].

Ensuring It Sounds Good in, on or Over the Listener’s Ear

LE Audio delivers the music or voice signal more efficiently than its predecessor, Bluetooth Classic. Audio engineers still need to verify their devices’ audio performance as experienced by the end user.

The listener’s pinna, the external part of the ear, and ear canal are a critical part of the playback system. For example, the low-frequency response and the effectiveness of active noise-cancellation are highly dependent on the seal between the device and the listener’s ear canal. Similarly, on-ear and over-ear headphones interact with the listener’s pinnas.

Anthropomorphic test fixtures—most notably GRAS KEMAR (Knowles Electronics Manikin for Acoustic Research) head and torso simulators—incorporate soft, deformable anthropomorphic pinnas that replicate realistic insertion and sealing conditions. These allow accurate replication of insertion depth, sealing, low-frequency response, and ANC performance [10][12].

Gaming headsets both receive and send audio. Just like music headphones, gaming headset testing benefits from fixtures with a human-like pinna to ensure repeatable measurement of ear-pad interaction. The headset’s microphone can be either a traditional boom microphone positioned close to the mouth or an array of microphones located farther away on the ear cups incorporating beamforming to isolate the wearer’s voice from any background noise. Test fixtures use an artificial mouth and a microphone positioned at the Mouth Reference Point (MRP) according to ITU-T standards to evaluate microphone performance under realistic speech and background noise conditions [10].

For testing of devices intended as broadcast receivers, an integrated test system with Auracast broadcast capability—like the Audio Precision Bluetooth 5 module—proves invaluable.

Conclusion

Bluetooth audio is no longer defined by a single radio or a single profile. It is defined by a timed pipeline—a codec that makes better sound with fewer bits, a transport that guarantees when those bits arrive, a radio that can sleep most of the time, and front‑end processing that gives the codec an easier job.

Hearing aids illustrate the payoff: arrays and beamformers improve intelligibility first; LC3 compresses with low delay; CIS schedules delivery; the radio sleeps; batteries last. Enhancements in other applications, such as gaming and public broadcast, further strengthen the case for adoption of this cutting-edge technology.

While Bluetooth audio began as a low-bandwidth, mono voice technology over Basic Rate (BR) radio in 1999, more than 25 years of evolution has produced a fundamental architectural shift. LE Audio replaces continuous point-to-point streams with scheduled, low-power, scalable audio delivery, enabling new classes of devices and use cases. The standards are ready, and audio test systems like Audio Precision’s Bluetooth 5 module are updated to incorporate the new transmission technology; the rest is execution—deploying LE Audio broadly so audio becomes instant, clear, and inclusive [2][7].

References

[1] Tosi, J., Taffoni, F., Santacatterina, M., Sannino, R., & Formica, D. (2017). Performance evaluation of Bluetooth Low Energy: A systematic review. Sensors, 17(12), Article 2898. https://doi.org/10.3390/s17122898

[2] Schnell, M., Riedl, M., Löllmann, H., & Multrus, M. (2021). LC3 and LC3plus: The new audio transmission standards for wireless communication. Proceedings of the AES 150th Convention, Online.

[3] Hermann, D., Herre, J., & Teichmann, R. (2004). Low-power implementation of the Bluetooth subband audio codec. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Montreal, QC, Canada.

[4] Abdelhamid, M. R., Chen, R., Cho, J., Chandrakasan, A. P., & Wentzloff, D. D. (2018). A −80 dBm BLE-compliant, FSK wake-up receiver with system and within-bit duty-cycling for scalable power and latency. Proceedings of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), San Diego, CA, USA.

[5] Mutar, M. S., Mohammed, A. H., & Abdulkareem, M. B. (2024). A survey of sleep scheduling techniques in wireless sensor networks for maximizing energy efficiency. AIP Conference Proceedings.

[6] Mikhaylov, K., & Karvonen, H. (2020). Wake-up radio enabled BLE wearables: Empirical and analytical evaluation of energy efficiency. Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology (ISMICT).

[7] Yan, Z., Xu, H., & Shen, Z. (2024). Modeling and analysis of the performance for CIS-based Bluetooth LE Audio [Preprint].

[8] Kaufmann, T. B., Weller, T., Stiefelhagen, R., & Adiloglu, K. (2023). Requirements for mass adoption of assistive listening technology by the general public. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02523

[9] Nasir, A. A., Durrani, S., Mehrpouyan, H., Blostein, S. D., & Kennedy, R. A. (2015). Timing and carrier synchronization in wireless communication systems: A survey and classification of research in the last five years. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02032

[10] Okorn, E., & Wulf-Andersen, P. (2019). Acoustic test fixtures: From KEMAR and beyond! The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 146(4), 2815. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5136656

[11] An analytical model of Bluetooth performance considering physical and link-layer effects. (2021). IEEE Xplore.

[12] IEC/ITU acoustic standards literature for headphone and earbud testing. (n.d.). Indexed in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and AIP Conference Proceedings.

Disclosure: AI tools were used by Wiley, which produced this sponsored article, to skim through research literature for technical insights on the evolution and state of the art of Bluetooth technology. AI was also used to polish the text for conciseness and technical accuracy.

• 77% of Android VPNs studied fail basic accountability and transparency tests.
• These 2,666 apps have amassed over 2 billion downloads combined
• 43% of the apps lack a usable website for troubleshooting or product research.
• 63% rely on non-proprietary email addresses (such as Gmail)
• 54% of apps have a substandard or inaccessible privacy policy

If you’re looking for a VPN for your Android device, it pays to be skeptical. Exclusive research by TechRadar has found that 77% of VPNs on the Google Play Store raise significant transparency and accountability concerns. And given these apps handle your sensitive browsing data, that’s a major red flag.

Of the 3,471 Android applications that claim to protect user privacy, we found that 2,666 have significant flaws.

Even casual observers of the early childhood space likely noticed the massive push for expanding access to care and education programs over the last year, most notably with universal preschool options.

But a less splashy effort has been quietly underway for years: making kindergarten mandatory, enrolling the small percent of children holding out from the entry-level grade in order to boost their academic and emotional success.

Enrolling children in kindergarten is only legally required for families in 20 states, though every state makes it mandatory for public schools to offer the entry-level grade to students. Students in those states can also complete kindergarten in private school or through homeschool, instead.

The mandate has gained momentum slowly over several decades, most recently in California, Michigan, New Jersey and Louisiana, though only the latter two ultimately passed new laws.

But as state leaders grapple with dwindling funds for early childhood education, and with the spotlight shining on the more popular push for universal preschool, the future of mandatory kindergarten remains murky.

“I bet there are lawmakers who don’t even know it’s not mandatory,” says Hanna Melnick, director of early learning policy at the Learning Policy Institute.

The Push for Kindergarten

The purpose of kindergarten has shifted over the years. Once a haven for educational play, kindergarten classrooms now tend to emphasize academic work. Regardless, educators and experts use it as a way to identify whether students have the social-emotional, language and motor skills they need for elementary school. Plenty of studies prove that enrolling in kindergarten reaps long-term rewards, both academically and socially, particularly for lower-income and minority students.

Those benefits are often mentioned by lawmakers looking to make kindergarten mandatory.

For example, Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in 2024 that mandatory kindergarten could decrease student absenteeism in addition to increasing student achievement. That measure failed to pass, though the state instead launched its expansive PreK for All initiative that same year.

“Any time a group of kids are being underserved, it’s not good for the kid or family,” Christina Weiland, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan, says.

“But for the teacher, if students are placed in first grade and they are behind, it places more demand on teachers on how to get every kid to the same place.”

Even states without technically mandated kindergarten have workarounds. Florida, for example, does not mandate kindergarten for all students, but for a student to enroll in a public school first-grade classroom, having completed kindergarten is a prerequisite. New Jersey leaves it up to individual school districts, and some require completing the grade while others do not.

Alabama in 2024 passed legislation requiring children who did not attend kindergarten to pass the “First Grade Readiness Assessment” in order to enroll directly into first grade. The test is being administered for the first time this school year. Those who do not pass will be required to attend kindergarten.

“This new law will ensure students are truly prepared to enter the first grade,” Alabama state representative Pebblin Warren, who has pushed for this legislation since 2019, said in a statement. She added that she hoped it would help even the playing field for students and their teachers, and help with future school retention.

Comparing Costs

California’s policy history offers a case study about the push and pull between investing in mandatory kindergarten versus other public early learning programs.

In California, 5 percent of families do not enroll their children into kindergarten. That adds up to about 200,000 kids sitting out.

In 2024, a bill was put forth to legally mandate students attend kindergarten before entering first grade. As of now, 6-year-olds must attend school, and it is up to parents whether to enroll them in kindergarten or first grade.

California’s proposal made it through the state House and Senate before Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, pointing toward the $268 million it would cost annually as too high a price tag.

However, starting in the 2022-2023 school year, similarly to in Michigan, Newsom approved California’s transitional kindergarten program, which sought to increase access to public education programs for 4-year-olds. In the most recent budget, Newsom proposed $1.8 billion in additional funding for expanding the state’s transitional kindergarten program, which effectively serves as universal pre-K.

Financial cost is one big factor as officials weigh which kinds of early learning programs to support. Sometimes the pain of big upfront bills seem to outweigh the potential longer-term payoff for society, says Emma Garcia, a principal researcher at the Learning Policy Institute.

“I feel like sometimes the argument used against it is, ‘Oh, it costs a lot and the effects fade,” she says. “But it’s what society gains from the early investment.”

There’s also the political “costs” of passing new regulations mandating participation in school.

“Offering a service tends to be fairly popular; requiring it tends to be less so,” Sarah Novicoff, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, says. “It’s all about questions of priorities, about what the state particularly thinks will make change in the most impactful way and there’s trade-offs to all these things.”

Today’s political climate favors “parental choice,” both in the ideological sense of parents knowing what is best for their children, and in the literal sense via school vouchers.

“Family choice has always been embedded in any child care policy,” Jade Jenkins, an associate professor of education at the University of California Irvine who has studied the effects of mandatory kindergarten since 2015. “And with the conservative sentiment dominating the landscape these days, which is parental choice and the push toward educational choice for school-aged children, nationalizing or any kind of early childhood educational mandates are further off.”

It’s not obvious that even families who do participate in kindergarten always value it fully, at least according to attendance records. According to the American Enterprise Institute, 1 in 3 California kindergarten students were chronically absent, or missed 10 percent or more of a school year.

If families put less stock in kindergarten, it might be because of the reality that, in many places, only half-day programs are available. According to the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit tracking education policy, only 16 states and Washington D.C. require schools to offer all-day kindergarten options, with the remainder mandating half-day offerings.

Without that all-day offering, many parents are left in the lurch for half of the work day.

“It’s not just about parent choice: They offer half day, and you often have to pay for full day [care], which is a real access problem where policies could make a difference,” Weiland says. “A push toward offering full day is probably more meaningful, at least on the equity side.”

Potential Wins and Roadblocks

It turns out that the two policy ideas — offering universal pre-K and mandating kindergarten — may lead to the same place. Some experts posit that expanded pre-K could help place students on the elementary public school track earlier.

After all, Weiland says, “I’ve never heard of doing universal pre-K and then not kindergarten; that’s not too much of a common path, at least.”

That seems especially likely in areas like Washington, D.C., and Boston, where universal preschool programs are embedded in public school settings (as opposed to offered at standalone centers or in-home programs).

“In a mixed-delivery system, we have no reason to believe this would make me stay in public school, but in places like Boston where it’s highly regarded in the public schools, we have found they are somewhat more likely to stay in public schools,” Jenkins says.

And that could help in a small way with the enrollment issues schools have encountered since the pandemic. While school enrollment rates for 5-year-olds are high — 84 percent across the country, according to the National Center for Education Statistics — they began dipping postpandemic, down 6 percent for 5-year-olds from 2019 to 2021.

These days, education leaders are also worried about longer-term demographic and birth rate changes primed to hurt schools, such as “the fertility cliff and the enrollment cliff,” Jenkins says. For institutions that are funded based on a per-pupil method of calculation, that means fewer dollars.

Weiland pointed toward states like Vermont, Maine and West Virginia that have all been hit particularly hard with enrollment dips and had to close down schools.

“We have these school enrollment crises, where the birth cohorts are getting smaller, and it doesn’t make great financial sense for kindergarten classrooms to go under-enrolled,” she says. “That could have some political momentum to increase enrollment numbers.”

For schools trying to stay open, every additional kindergartener helps.

If you were betting on Samsung finally baking built-in magnets into the Galaxy S26 series this year, well — you lost. For the second year running, Samsung has skipped native Qi2 magnetic hardware across the entire S26 lineup.

No MPP (Magnetic Power Profile), no satisfying snap onto your wireless charger. Just a phone that sits on a pad and hopes for the best with alignment. The reason? Space, apparently.

Samsung didn’t include wireless charging magnets due to “space constraints”

At the Unpacked event, when asked why the Galaxy S26 still misses out on magnets, a Samsung executive told Digital Trends that it was probably due to space constraints. They didn’t go deep into the engineering process behind it all, but ruled out that there were any thermal concerns behind the decision.

So the internals are just too busy to fit a ring of magnets. Sure, Samsung. We believe you. I’d say that Google’s decision to finally include wireless magnetic charging on the Pixel 10 series — dubbed Pixelsnap charging — gives the series a clear edge in terms of daily charging convenience.

Here’s where things get genuinely better — on paper, at least. Wireless charging speeds are up across the lineup: the S26+ now tops out at 20W, and the Ultra goes all the way to 25W Qi2. The base S26 is still stuck at 15W, but the jump for the two bigger models is real and welcome.

Faster wireless charging — on supported models — is a bit confusing

The catch? Those faster speeds come with strings attached. Specifically, a magnetic case. Without one, your phone is limited to whatever the Qi spec’s Extended Power Profile allows — which is 15W, full stop.

Anything beyond that sits in Magnetic Power Profile territory, and that standard physically needs magnets to lock alignment and pull higher wattage from the charger. No magnets on the phone means no alignment means no extra speed (via 9To5Google).

Samsung’s own 25W wireless charger is itself a magnetic puck, which tells you everything — it barely works without a magnetic case in the picture.

At least you get new magnetic cases and charging gear

To Samsung’s credit, the company isn’t leaving buyers stranded. It launched a fresh lineup of first-party magnetic cases alongside the S26 series — silicone options with Qi2 magnets built inside, a transparent patterned “Rugged” variant, and a returning clear case.

Samsung also dropped a new Magnet Wireless Charger (a slim 4.4mm Qi2 puck with a fabric USB-C cable, currently on sale for $34.99 from $49.99) and a 5,000mAh magnetic power bank with a kickstand.

Third-party brands like Belkin, ESR, and dbrand have piled in too, with magnetic S26 cases that bring full MagSafe-style snap-on functionality to the table.

Is it a little absurd that you need to buy a case just to use a charger at full speed? Absolutely. But at least the ecosystem around that workaround is now genuinely good.