Technology

The coronavirus outbreak continues to impact the tech industry, FacebookLibra Association signs up a new partner and short-form video service Quibi is available for pre-order. Hereyour Daily Crunch for February 21, 2020.

1. PC shipments expected to drop this year because of coronavirus outbreak

The coronavirus outbreak could result in at least a 3.3% drop — and as high as a 9% dip — in the volume of PCs that will ship globally this year, according to research firm Canalys.

&In the best-case scenario, production levels are expected to revert to full capacity by April 2020, hence the biggest hit will be to sell-in shipments in the first two quarters, with the market recovering in Q3 and Q4,& the firm said.

2. Shopify joins Facebookcryptocurrency Libra Association

After eBay, Visa, Stripe and other high-profile partners ditched the Facebook-backed cryptocurrency collective, Libra scored a win with the addition of Shopify. The e-commerce platform will become a member of Libra Association, contributing at least $10 million and operating a node that processes transactions for the Facebook-originated stable coin.

3. Quibistreaming service app launches in app stores for pre-order

Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service from Jeffrey Katzenberg, is now open for pre-orders. The company declined to fully show off its app only a month ago at CES — instead, demos focused on its &TurnStyle& technology — but it appears the app is ready nonetheless.

4. Volocopter extends Series C funding to $94M with backing from logistics giant DB Schenker and others

With this new funding, Volocopter brings its total raised to around $132 million, and it says it will use the newly acquired capital to help certify its VoloCity aircraft, an air taxi designed to transport people, which is on track to become the companyfirst-ever vehicle licensed for commercial operation.

5. Where top VCs are investing in manufacturing and warehouse robotics

With our 2020 Robotics + AI sessions event less than two weeks away, we&ve decided to perform temperature checks across some of the hottest robotics sub-verticals to see which trends are coming down the pipe and where checks are actually being written. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. How ‘The Mandalorian& and ILM invisibly reinvented film and TV production

While a successful live-action Star Wars TV series is important in its own right, the way this particular show was made represents a far greater change, perhaps the most important since the green screen.

7. Shogun raises $10M to help e-commerce brands build faster websites

The companyfirst product, Page Builder, offers a drag-and-drop interface to make it easier for e-commerce brands to build their storefronts on Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce and Magento. And therea new product, Shogun Frontend, which allows brands to create a web storefront thatentirely customized while still using one of the big commerce platforms as their back end.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunchroundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you&d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has been sharing a number of updates about his companyprogress on Starship this week. Along with footage of the assembly process of the current &SN1& prototype of Starship, he explained on Twitter some of the other considerations and strategies the company is working with as it works on the new spacecraft and tries to fly it to space this year.

Musk said that SpaceX is iterating at a much faster pace with Starship than it has recently with Falcon, as Falcondesign more or less stabilized once it started working consistently. He noted that the ability to progress with the design toward having a production vehicle is dependent on the number of interactions of the prototypes of the spacecraft, multiplied by the progress achieved between each version.

Thatbeen the way that SpaceX has worked in the past, and one of the key reasons itbeen able to upend the traditional rocket launch industry. It moves fast, iterating as it goes and making changes based on failures quickly, whereas the industry has largely focused on more stop/start development cycles where things are mostly fixed with brief periods of intense focus on improvement between long-lived vehicle generations.

Starship presents the companybiggest challenge yet when it comes to this model, if only because of the scale of the rocket. Starship is by far SpaceXlargest rocket, and building a number of them quickly is actually a significant challenge just from a mechanical perspective, especially when you factor in the considerable changes between generations, and the eventual addition of the very large Super Heavy rocket booster.

On top of the scale of the spacecraft, therealso the nature of the vehicle, which SpaceX aims to make fully reusable — with quick turnaround between each flight. Itfairly easy (relatively speaking, of course) to build a spacecraft that only really needs to work once; itanother thing entirely to build one that you want to reuse tens or even hundreds of times.

Last year, Musk had said at the unveiling of the first completed full-scale prototype of the Starship that they&d aim to have an orbital flight in as few as six months& time. Itincreasingly looking like that was yet another extremely optimistic timeline from the SpaceX founder, and SN1 is still aiming to complete a high-altitude suborbital flight before future versions actually make the trip to space. Musk suggested SN3, SN4 or SN5 could be the one to take that trip, according to Ars TechnicaEric Berger.

Berger also reports that SpaceX is considering one of three options for actually launching the orbital Starship prototype, which will be powered by six of the companyRaptor engines. These will include either flying from Boca Chica, Texas (this is most likely), where the spacecraft are being built, or from Florida, where SpaceX maintains a launch facility for its Falcon rockets, or as a third option, from a sea-based floating launch platform.

SpaceX will need to increase the rate at which it is building, testing and flying these prototypes if it aims to make 2020 for an orbital flight, but italso hiring up to help it speed up production. Earlier this year Musk sent out a call for job applicants to staff up additional production shifts for round-the-clock operations, and SpaceX hosted a job fair for interested applicants at its Texas site earlier this month.

It looks like Apple has plans to give the MacBook Pro 13-inch a considerable power boost in 2020. And, it’s about darn time, especially since 8th-generation Intel Core processors are aging at this point, especially on a premium laptop.

A 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, recently leaked by @_rogame on Twitter, shows a new 13-inch MacBook Pro boasting