Brian Barrett

My daughter needs a purple wig for school, and she needs it by this Friday. When I got the news Monday night, I had just one reliable option—Amazon—and the rancid-tapioca feeling that comes with using it. The problem isn’t just the company’s rough track record with worker safety, or its devastating effect on brick-and-mortar stores, or knowing that I was about to toss more data into its insatiable maw. Despite all that, I’m still a Prime subscriber.

Some annoyances in life are unavoidable: the creak in your knees as you age, the tax code, Pete Davidson. Others are foisted on you by corporations hell-bent on leveraging their market power for financial gain. The iPhone cord is the latter.For more than a decade, Apple’s Lightning cable has been something like the avocado of consumer electronics: wildly expensive relative to its shelf life.