Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here.
Greetings, nerds and Luddites. I’m Brian X. Chen, your personal tech columnist, and I’m here to guide you through the week’s tech news.
Let me get this off my chest: Does anyone else feel that Amazon is slowly taking over the world?
Riding on the success of Amazon Prime, the company is offering incentives for Whole Foods shoppers to sign up for Prime. This week, Prime members started getting an extra 10 percent off items that are marked on sale (with a yellow tag) at all Whole Foods stores across the United States. To redeem the discount at the checkout counter, you open the Whole Foods app on your smartphone and scan a bar code.
Amazon seems well aware that people are so unaccustomed to getting discounts at Whole Foods that they will exchange data about their grocery shopping habits for a few cents. The other day, I scanned the bar code at Whole Foods and shaved a dollar off my $56 grocery bill. Maybe in a few months, I’ll save up enough to get a free bottle of kale juice.
Beyond groceries, Amazon is starting to invade our lives through the world of pharmaceuticals. This week, the company said it had acquired PillPack, an online pharmacy, in a deal that could immediately make it a big player in the drug business. The acquisition helps Amazon overcome the bureaucratic hurdle of securing pharmacy licenses, since PillPack is already licensed to ship prescriptions in 50 states.
The purchase is expected to close in the second half of 2018. So pretty soon, when you’re restocking your home with diapers, dog food and trash bags on Amazon, you may also be able to refill your drug prescriptions.
In other Amazon news this week — yes, there really is more! — the company said it planned to expand its army of delivery workers, announcing a program that helps people start businesses delivering packages for the e-commerce giant. Here’s the pitch: If you invest at least $10,000, you can operate a fleet of Amazon-branded vehicles and manage people who wear Amazon uniforms. Amazon estimates an owner could earn as much as $300,000 a year in profit operating a fleet of up to 40 vehicles.
It’s another effort by Amazon to build out its own delivery logistics. The company already runs Amazon Flex, a program that pays people $18 to $25 an hour to deliver packages from their own cars.
So can Amazon do a better job at delivering packages than services like FedEx, United Parcel Service or the United States Postal Service? I guess we’ll find out.
Other stuff:
■ Apple and Samsung Electronics finally ended their smartphone patent wars. It only took seven years. Law professors said the whole legal battle was pretty pointless.
■ Because we can’t get enough Amazon: A writer for The Atlantic, Alana Semuels, documented her experience delivering packages for Amazon Flex in San Francisco. She found that after expenses were accounted for, she earned less than minimum wage.
■ Facebook said it was giving up on producing a fleet of solar-powered drones that would beam internet access to people around the world. The company said it would rely on other companies to build aircraft.
■ Apple’s funky-looking wireless earphones, AirPods, may get an upgrade next year. Bloomberg says to expect higher-end AirPods with features like noise cancellation and water resistance.
■ And finally, our tech columnist, Farhad Manjoo, says we have reached “Peak Screen,” with Americans spending three to four hours a day looking at their phones and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind. As we look ahead, the question is how can we move toward a less tech-immersed future.
Brian X. Chen writes the Tech Fix column, a research-driven feature aimed at solving your everyday tech problems. You can follow him on Twitter here: @bxchen.
