Google has revealed its previously secret drone delivery program to Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic. The program, dubbed Project Wing, has been in development for two years by the company’s Google X research lab. Google is “cautiously optimistic” that it will be able to work something out with regulators, who have so far shot down the idea of delivery drones, likely to preempt citizens from shooting down the actual drones. Regardless, Madrigal’s story is a fascinating look into the technical issues faced by Google and delivery drone programs from Amazon and others.

After Adam Engst’s struggles with replacing his iPhone 5 battery on his own, Josh Centers takes the Apple-approved path, and found that it can be every bit as frustrating.

Overcast developer Marco Arment wants to find the perfect pair of headphones, and in the service of that quest, he has acquired and reviewed 19 pairs of portable, closed headphones to identify the best in that category. Surprisingly, the oft-derided Beats Studio, which Arment credits for popularizing high-end headphones, wasn’t the worst of the lot. The winner in both sound quality and comfort might surprise you, as it was one of the least expensive models tested.

John Siracusa sat down for a Q&A session with the Columbia Journalism Review to discuss his nearly fourteen years of annual Mac OS X reviews for Ars Technica. Siracusa talks about how Apple’s interactions with the press have changed, and what drives him to be so hypercritical.

Apple has announced a replacement program for defective iPhone 5 batteries. Josh Centers explains how to check if you’re qualified, and how to get a replacement, or a refund if you were forced to replace the battery before this.

Barely able to tie your shoes, much less rig a sailboat? Josh Centers has discovered an iOS app that can open up a world of adventure.

Apple has released the second public beta of the upcoming OS X Yosemite, but with no word about what might have changed. If you’re running the first public beta, get the new version from the Updates tab in the App Store app. You can still sign up for the public beta, and regardless, we recommend picking up a copy of Joe Kissell’s name-your-own-price “Take Control of Beta Testing Yosemite,” which provides complete details on preparing for, installing, and testing the Yosemite beta.

The NFL is now available on the Apple TV, and it’s mostly free. Unfortunately, it may not be what you’ve been hoping for.

Ed Bott of ZDNet argues that Apple is winning the PC market, or at least the only segment that still matters. Though Macs accounted for less than 6 percent of last year’s PC sales overall, Bott estimates that Apple’s MacBook Air controls 30 percent of the “premium ultramobile” segment of the market, which also includes high-end Ultrabooks and Microsoft’s Surface Pro line. That part of the market is highly profitable, and is expected to grow by 50 percent this year alone.

Apple is offering DuckDuckGo as a Safari search engine in the upcoming iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. Learn more about this upstart search engine, why privacy lovers swear by it, and how it can save you time.

Email is far from hip these days. Pundits and investors alike salivate over ways to replace it with something more modern, but The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal argues that email is still the best part of the Internet. Despite its flaws, email is open, universal, decentralized, mobile-friendly, and decidedly less commercial than alternate communications technologies. Madrigal argues that email may be our last best hope of keeping the large tech firms from imprisoning us in their proprietary walled gardens.

Apple has banned the use of two chemicals that endangered the health of Chinese iPhone assemblers: n-hexane, which is used to clean screens and could cause nerve damage and paralysis; and benzene, a known carcinogen that’s used to coat electronic components. However, these chemicals are still in use further up in the supply chain, and Apple is being pressured to eliminate them from the entire chain.

On Medium, Lauren Archer has tracked the evolution of the use of “x” as a symbol to denote closing a window. While it’s now ubiquitous on both Mac and Windows, it wasn’t a common convention until Windows 95, which in turn picked it up from NeXT, but Archer traces the symbol’s origins even earlier, to Atari’s TOS 1.0 from 1985.

Following in the footsteps of other tech companies, Apple has revealed statistics about the diversity of Apple employees. Unsurprisingly, Apple is mostly composed of white males, of which CEO Tim Cook said, “As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They’re not new to us, and we’ve been working hard for quite some time to improve them.” However, Cook did not offer specifics on how he plans to achieve that, but he did mention three women who have recently been hired into executive roles at Apple: Angela Ahrendts, Lisa Jackson, and Denise Young-Smith.

Brian X. Chen of the New York Times was granted a rare, if limited, peek into Apple University, the company’s internal training program. The program offers courses on Apple business decisions, design choices, and what makes Apple tick. One of the more interesting tidbits is that Apple uses lithographs of Picasso’s “The Bull” as an example of how to narrow a concept to its essential elements.