While some drivers did shut off their apps and some protested in public at airports and in front of local headquarters for Uber and Lyft on Wednesday, May 8, it appears that the planned Uber, Lyft strike had little overall effect on either rideshare company or its customers.
The New York Post reported that rideshare hailing and pricing was no different from any other average Wednesday, while Boston ABC affiliate WCVB showed only a handful of drivers picketing at Logan Airport. Los Angeles picket lines looked much the same.
It is unclear whether Uber or Lyft took any measures to prevent surge pricing (something the New York Taxi Workers Alliance claimed it did, which Uber denied), or despite the intense media coverage this week that drivers didn’t know about that. A New York Post reporter found just that: A driver said he didn’t know about the strike and wasn’t even sure if he would have participated if he did.
In the end, it could really have come down to a mixture of lack of organization, apathy, and the stark reality that some drivers just couldn’t afford to take the time off.
One place, however, where at least the appearance of driver unrest could have had an effect is on Wall Street. Uber priced its IPO at the lower end of its guidance possibly in a nod to investor skittishness, and analysts have pointed to the fact that executives are set to make billions thanks to the IPO while most drivers will see little, if any, benefit.
All of this is already having an effect on the market: Lyft stock lost nearly 10% of its value this week, the majority of it during Wednesday’s planned strike.
With the drivers making the whole platform possible, calls have begun for Uber and Lyft to finally reckon with how they treat and pay their drivers.
“I think it’s a moral stain in the long run where we have this system where this sector gets evade minimum wage laws,” New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo said Thursday on CNBC’s Squawk Box program. “In the long run, that doesn’t seem tenable to me.”
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.