🌎 iPhone looks better in pink

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Here’s what you need to know

You can now spend even more money on an iPhone. But at least it can be pink! More details below.

McDonald’s is calling time on self-serve soda. By 2032, all soda machines in US McDonald’s outlets will be behind the counter, as dining spaces shrink and high-tech drive-thrus proliferate.

BP and Ford are making changes at the top. The British oil giant’s CEO Bernard Looney is stepping down over not disclosing relationships with employees, to be replaced in the interim by CFO Murray Auchincloss, while the US-based automaker is putting two of founder Henry Ford’s descendants in top spots as the company focuses more on EVs.

There’s nickel in them thar hills. The US Defense Department is giving $20.6 million to mine developers in Minnesota in a bid to strengthen the domestic supply chain for nickel, a metal used in aerospace materials and lithium-ion batteries.

The iPhone 15 is here

After the 15 debuted yesterday at Apple’s Wonderlust event, investors were unimpressed—Apple’s stock was down 1.7% in late-session trading, to $176.30 per share at the time of writing. The new models may not look that much different than the old, but that’s par for the course for the last several releases. Let’s take a look at what’s new.

📷 Slightly better camera

📱 Slightly better screen

🩷 New pink body color

💰 Record high price (for iPhone Pro Max customers, who will pay $1,199, or, if you want to pay for a storage upgrade to a full terabyte, $1,599)

🔌 USB-C port, as Apple finally caves to EU pressure to abandon their proprietary lightning cable and embrace the standard

Diego Lasarte rounds up everything else you need to know.

Instacart may not be heading for instasuccess

Online grocery delivery service Instacart will go public next week, giving its venture capital investors the exit they’ve been looking for. The company has a small user base with high margins on fees, grocery enterprise software, and advertising, but investors are going to look for the stock to take off quickly as the tech sector rebounds from a year of de-risking.

And they’re going to have some questions. Here’s just one:

Q. Why is Instacart’s customer base so small? With only 7.7 million users, it’s curious Instacart didn’t come out of the pandemic a little plumper (particularly since meal delivery service DoorDash has 32 million monthly users).

Maternal mortality is fixable

The global maternal death rate had been dropping between 2000 and 2015—the first such drop in recorded history—but in 2016, that progress flatlined. Since then, that rate has increased in many countries, including the US. Now, a new mother dies from childbirth every two minutes.

Yesterday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation issued its seventh annual Goalkeepers Report, which tracks progress on development goals agreed to in 2015 by 193 world leaders. While the numbers aren’t amazing for maternal mortality, the report names several solutions that would be easy—and cheap—to put in place. Here are a few:

1️⃣ Reducing postpartum hemorrhage

2️⃣ Supplements that combat malnutrition

3️⃣ Anemia treatment

And, of course, there’s even the potential for AI to step in. Read more about the report, and why there’s every reason to hope, if action is taken soon.

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Surprising discoveries

Your cold medication may not really be doing anything for you. Phenylephrine, a key ingredient in over-the-counter cold and medication, is quite ineffective, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Campari shares have risen more than 520% under its outgoing CEO. That far outpaces the Stoxx Europe 600 Index, up just 16% during the same time.

There’s an official Catan cookbook. Making the 77 recipes with friends probably will bring less fight risk than playing the game.

Wine flooded the streets of a Portuguese city. Nearly 600,000 gallons of the crimson liquid was accidentally dumped in São Lourenço do Bairro, enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool.

Sony is launching a foster program for its $2,900 robot dog. It’s really just a recycling program for old Aibo bodies, which will be refurbished and donated to medical facilities that often don’t allow real dogs.

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