Apple will replace a lost AirPod for $69:

Following a slightly delay, Apple’s wireless AirPods are ready to order. They’re small and sleek, but the lack of cords has put a nagging thought in the back of my mind: I am guaranteed to lose one, if not both within a few weeks. If you’re equally forgetful, or happen to commute in jam-packed subway carriages, you’ll be happy to hear that Apple will replace a single AirPod for $69 (£65). Given a fresh pair costs $159 (£159), that seems like a reasonable fee. Similarly, a new AirPod charging case will set you back $69 (£65), for the inevitable “I threw it out thinking it was floss” stories.

I’m so confused by this story.

Why is Apple responsible for replacing something you lost?

Life has become way to easy for humans when this is the stuff we get frustrated about.

A Dose of a Hallucinogen From a ‘Magic Mushroom,’ and Then Lasting Peace:

None of those possibilities fit Kevin, who had a bone-marrow transplant for acute myeloid leukemia. It sent his cancer into remission, but left him with graft-versus-host disease.

Suffering from chronic pain and fatigue, Kevin, 57, who lives in central Michigan and asked that his last name be withheld because he had been in law enforcement, had to retire. Four years after the transplant, he despaired.

“Going through a near-death illness is similar to returning from combat,” he said. “It damages who you are, to the core of what it is to be human.”

“I was hoping to get out of this funk of waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he added. “You’re looking up to the heavens, saying ‘What else can I try?’ ”

In 2013, Kevin entered the Johns Hopkins trial. During his session, he saw spirals of iridescent spheres that folded in on themselves.

The experience did not restore him to his former life, he said, “but I have a greater sense of peace of what might come. I’m very grateful, beyond words, for this trial. But you have to approach the session with the right intentions of why you’re doing it. Because you’re going to meet yourself.”

This is incredible news for people who suffer from anxiety and depression.

The last time I ate ‘magic’ mushrooms (aka ‘shrooms’) was over 16 years ago in college. It was truly a mind-opening experience.

Even Steve Jobs raved about the profound effect LSD had on him:

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

To be clear: shrooms and LSD, while both hallucinogens, have widely varying effects on different people.

Trump voter lost home, blames incoming Treasury secretary:

When Donald Trump named his Treasury secretary, Teena Colebrook felt her heart sink.

She had voted for the president-elect on the belief that he would knock the moneyed elites from their perch in Washington. And she knew Trump’s pick for Treasury — Steven Mnuchin — all too well.

OneWest, a bank formerly owned by a group of investors headed by Mnuchin, had foreclosed on her Los Angeles-area home in the aftermath of the Great Recession, stripping her of the two units she rented as a primary source of income.

This woman’s face — along with every other person who voted for Trump and truly thought he’s a “Washington outsider” who’ll “shake up the establishment” — is now in the dictionary under the word ‘gullible’.

Seriously, how much of a sucker can you be? You think an orange-faced, New York billionaire has the common peoples’ interests in mind? If so, I’d like to sell you some things after I get off the phone with the Tooth Fairy.

Pebble Supporters Are Pissed Over Rumors It Will Sell Itself:

Pebble, the maker of the original e-ink smartwatch, has a lot of passionate and loyal customers, and those customers are pissed. Following the rumors that Pebble is about to crumble under the heel of Fitbit, the company’s many Kickstarter backers are in an uproar.

As we shared earlier today, rumor has it fitness tracker maker Fitbit is in talks to buy Pebble, dismantle the business, and take all the tech. It’s a smart move for Fitbit, and an ouch move for Pebble, which would be selling for a tenth of what watch maker Citizen offered it last year.

Hey, this is business. Too bad. I was never a fan of Pebble. The design of the user interface is interesting, but I still think the hardware designs are ugly.

I always like it when greedy startup founders reject huge offers only to end up settling for a fraction of the amount later on. At the same time I can understand why Pebble rejected the offer. Citizen would have had no idea what to do with Pebble if they had acquired them.

This detail about the yet-to-be-shipped Pebble 2 Kickstarter rewards is infuriating:

Things are bleaker for Pebble Time 2 backers. Those backers were expecting an update in November with an anticipated ship date of January 2017. Instead, many woke up this morning to find that there was still no news on shipments. (Pebble last communicated to backers October 26.) However, there was news of Pebble possibly disappearing completely.

They raised $12.7 million dollars and still have unfulfilled rewards.

That’s bullshit.

The New York Times is buying The Wirecutter for $30 million:

The New York Times is buying The Wirecutter, a five-year-old online consumer guide.

The Times will pay more than $30 million, including retention bonuses and other payouts, for the startup, according to people familiar with the transaction.

Brian Lam, a former editor at Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, founded The Wirecutter in 2011, and has self-funded the company’s growth.

The Wirecutter provides recommendations for electronics and other gadgets that are both obsessively researched and simply presented. The Wirecutter also owns The Sweethome, which takes the same approach for home appliances and other gear.

I’ve been a fan of The Wirecutter for a few years now. I think of them as a Consumer Reports for gadgets, although the range of products they review is pretty wide. I dig how they usually have only one recommendation for a product category (and a few runners up).

They do the best job of any site I’ve ever seen of answering the question, “I need a [product category]. Which [product category] should I buy?”

Just last week I went to their site for a recommendation on a surge protector.

ProPublica set out to see how Amazon’s software was shaping the marketplace:

We looked at 250 frequently purchased products over several weeks to see which ones were selected for the most prominent placement on Amazon’s virtual shelves — the so-called “buy box” that pops up first as a suggested purchase. About three-quarters of the time, Amazon placed its own products and those of companies that pay for its services in that position even when there were substantially cheaper offers available from others.

I am shocked Amazon would do something to help them make more money.

The Netflix Backlash: Why Hollywood Fears a Content Monopoly:

Still, at a time when business is tough all over in the entertainment industry, there is a lot of gratitude for a deep-pocketed buyer that is snapping up an array of material, much of which might not find a home elsewhere. Netflix and its chief content officer Ted Sarandos are at once a savior, offering a giant gush of money to license shows that in some cases were past their prime or even out of production, and a terrifying competitor to studios.

“Out of the blue Netflix comes into the market and says, ‘We’re going to give you a number [to license a network show],’ ” says one television agent. “For the studios, it was, ‘Holy shit. Do we even need a cable sale?’ They all got addicted to crack. Nobody really thought they’d be a competitor on the originals market. They used stuff from the studios and became important. Now you see the backlash.”

It’s important to understand who’s not scared of Netflix: the actors, writers, directors and everyone else behind the great shows Netflix is buying. Creative people with talent who create great content have nothing to worry about.

From interviews I’ve seen with people who have worked with Netflix, they all say it’s great. Netflix gives them free rein over everything and they don’t meddle in the process (as it should be).

It looks like Microsoft is kicking ass with their mobile phone division:

Microsoft is cutting 2,850 more jobs beyond the 1,850 that the company announced would be eliminated earlier this year. The new cuts will hit phone hardware and sales.

The entire computer world has moved to mobile, with everyone on either iOS or Android, while Microsoft is at the gate after the flight has taken off. They began efforts to reboot Windows Phone a few years after the iPhone came out (2008-ish), but as we can see by their job cuts in mobile, it has not been successful. If you look at any chart of mobile market share they rarely come up.

This failure in Microsoft’s mobile hardware efforts is interesting in light of the 300 million active devices that are (supposedly) running Windows 10 as of this past May.

Meanwhile, today is your last chance to get Windows 10 for free, because, you know, it’s that great that people will want to buy it tomorrow.

Regular readers of Daily Exhaust know I’m not a fan of Microsoft. I feel this way for a lot of reasons. I think they’re always a day late and a dollar short with new products (see Windows Phone, Nokia, Microsoft Stores, etc), they historically have not valued design, and every attempt at being cool ends up being very, very, very uncool.

The latest example is a recruitment email aimed at interns (via Twitter):

You’re not cool, Microsoft, you’re fuckin’ chilly, and chilly ain’t never been cool.

Uber data reveals drivers earn less than $13.25 an hour:

Uber is always droning on about how drivers are able to make money by driving their own vehicle, while having the freedom to choose their own schedules. A few years ago, Uber told The Wall Street Journal that a typical driver earns more than $100,000 a year in gross fares. However, new data and calculations based off a million trips reveals a different picture. In three major US markets – Denver, CO, Detroit, MI, and Houston, TX – Uber drivers earned less than $13.25 an hour.

It’s important to note Uber drivers are paid per ride, not by the hour, but $13.25 hourly average is still not much income for a company “valued” at over $60 billion (as of December 2015) and one that classifies its drivers as contractors, not employees.

It would paint a more complete picture if we also knew how many hours a week Uber drivers work.

Spotify: Apple is holding up app approval to squash competition:

Like other apps, Spotify had been getting customers to foot the bill for Apple’s App Store billing fees by charging an extra $3 a month. It recently launched a promotion for the second time that gave new users three months of service for a dollar, if they signed up on the web. As you can imagine, that didn’t make Apple too happy, and the company reportedly threatened to pull the app entirely unless Spotify stopped pushing the deal for iPhone owners. It complied with the request, but it also nixed the iTunes billing option in the iOS version which lead to the current dispute.

On one hand, I feel like this ends up hurting happy Spotify and Apple customers. Elizabeth Warren recently accused Apple, Amazon, and Google of anti-competitive practices. This issue with Spotify only adds fuel to the fire.

On the other hand, why should Apple make and exception for Spotify and wave the App Store fee? It seems as though the Google Play store also charges 30% fees like Apple.

Last week news broke that Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.1 billion:

For Microsoft, a big part of the deal is about being at the center of the business worker’s world.

While it has ceded the personal social graph to Facebook and others, it sees being at the center of the worker’s world as too important to miss. Microsoft had hoped its SharePoint would be the social hub for business, but has seen a lot of momentum in that area shift to Slack. Microsoft also bought Yammer, an enterprise social collaboration company, for $1.2 billion in 2012, but that acquisition has essentially gone nowhere.

LinkedIn’s know-how is also important for Cortana and its broader artificial intelligence aspirations. With this purchase, Microsoft is basically buying the company org chart for the whole world, which on its face seems a pretty good layer of data to build into any business-focused cloud product, from email to enhancing a customer relationship software to recruiting new employees.

“Microsoft wanted to get into human resources without having to get into payrolls,” said Ray Wang, an analyst with Constellation Research.

As I’ve mentioned many times on this site, Microsoft does not understand—nor do I think they will ever understand—consumers, so it’s good to see them refocusing on the business side of software and computing.

L2 Founder Scott Galloway keenly points out in this YouTube video “there’s only one B2B game in town and that’s LinkedIn.” Great point. So why don’t we have any other competitors in B2B social media space? Seems a great area to disrupt.

A software giant buying a B2B social network is like a cable company buying content producers. It just doesn’t sit right with me.

It’s be interesting to see how long I keep my LinkedIn account open before Microsoft does something to make me want to close it.

Microsoft tried to clone the Apple Store. It still hasn’t worked:

Microsoft’s stores have a warm decor, plenty of helpful staffers and an array of PCs, phones and devices. They could use a few more customers, though.

It’s hard to know exactly how the stores are doing since Microsoft won’t comment on either sales or traffic figures. It is fair to say, though, that it is not uncommon to visit stores in which workers outnumber customers.

In San Francisco, even the tiny Amazon kiosk a floor below often has more customers than the far larger Microsoft store.

This is a remnant of the Steve Ballmer Era Microsoft.

They can probably afford to keep them running, but I’d throw in the towel.

Uber enables global e-hailing through Alipay to fend against Lyft/Didi alliance:

Now, riders will be able to pay for and hail a ride in the Alipay app in the more than 400 cities in which Uber operates. It’s an extension of Uber’s existing partnership with the company, which initially only allowed passengers in China to pay for their rides using Alipay.

The move comes just a few weeks after Lyft and China’s Didi launched a similar integration that allows Didi riders to hail a Lyft in the U.S. using the Didi Chuxing (formerly Didi Kuaidi) app, and vice versa. That partnership is part of a larger global ride-hail alliance that also includes South East Asia’s Grab and India’s Ola.

The goal of big business is constant growth. This is why there are laws against monopolies, because it’s the natural end state of any capitalist business.

Despite this, I grew up being told competition is healthy and keeps a business on it’s toes. But with Uber, it seems theres no room for competiton and any competition is an extreme threat that must be destroyed.

I continue use, and many times rely on, Uber, but I also continue disapprove of their record of shady business practices.