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Watch out! Once you drink Amazon Prime's kool-aid, you may find yourself renewing the service... forever. (Or, at least, for a third year.) (credit: Rachel Murray / Getty Images)

Amazon isn't likely to release granular data about its Prime subscribers anytime soon, which means a privately run survey has a little more weight than we might otherwise give it—especially with a conclusion as resounding as the one drawn by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners on Tuesday. The firm's latest report estimated an Amazon Prime retention rate that may only be rivaled by alcohol, cigarettes, and other drugs: 96 percent.

That's how many Prime members elect to renew the service after two full years of use, according to CIRP's estimate (which it surveys of 2,108 users. CIRP's numbers also found that 91 percent of one-year subscribers elect to renew for a second Prime year, while 73 percent of the service's free-trial users decide to pay for Prime.

The survey tracked renewal rates in all three of those cases, dating back as far as the second fiscal quarter of 2014, and it found that 30-day trial upgraders slowed down from June of 2014 until September of last year—which CIRP's study authors attributed to the March 2014 bump in Prime fees from $79 to $99. The rates slowly climbed from that point on, and they've had an upward trend in the other categories, as well—one-year renewals are up from 81 percent in early 2014, and two-year renewals have climbed from 81 percent that year, as well.

(credit: L'Ubuesque Boîte à Savon)

On Wednesday afternoon, Uber said that it had received a $3.5 billion investment from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund. That makes it the biggest investment ever raised in a single round by a venture-backed company. In exchange, a managing director at the Saudi fund, Yasir Al Rumayyan, will take a seat on Uber’s board, according to the New York Times.

Uber has been a presence in Saudi Arabia since 2014, and it’s grown rapidly from there. In the country, women aren’t allowed to drive and their travel is often restricted without the permission of a male guardian. To get around, women either hire private drivers or go through licensed taxi or limo companies to travel throughout the country’s major cities. Speaking to male strangers is also verboten, and according to Fast Company, Uber only works through those licensed limo companies that had been operating with the monarchy's permission for years before Uber’s arrival. The company has said that approximately 80 percent of riders in Saudi Arabia are women.

Uber’s value proposition is that it consolidates taxi and limo information, making it easier to order a car and reducing wait times for rides. The company also helps with residency and work permit paperwork for foreign drivers in the country.

Enlarge / The current (chunky, old) Thunderbolt Displays. (credit: Apple)

Remember the Thunderbolt Display? Because sometimes it seems like Apple doesn't; it's been nearly five years since the last time the monitor-plus-laptop-dock was updated, and it's increasingly an anachronism as high-resolution Retina displays take over the lineup. For some time now, the Thunderbolt Display has actually been larger and heavier than the 27-inch iMac, which has a whole computer inside of it.

One of the roadblocks to releasing a new 5K Retina-capable version of the Thunderbolt Display is the DisplayPort graphics interface, which in its current iteration (1.2) is only capable of driving a 4K display at 60Hz over a single cable. Even if Macs picked up Thunderbolt 3 ports, they still wouldn't support DisplayPort 1.3. Apple had to develop its own timing controller to make the built-in display work on the 5K iMac, but it can't drive an external display of the same resolution, nor can any current Apple laptop.

One potential solution, according to a report from 9to5Mac, is to put a dedicated GPU in the display itself—this would allow Apple to use the same timing controller from the 5K iMac to drive a 5K Thunderbolt display. This might have seemed like a strange solution a year or two ago, but Thunderbolt 3's adoption in the wider PC industry is already making it possible to use external graphics enclosures like the Razer Core to add dedicated graphics to thin-and-light Ultrabooks and mini PCs. Changes coming to OS X will allegedly allow hot plugging of one of these displays, switching seamlessly from the integrated GPU in the laptop to the dedicated GPU inside the monitor. Whether that dedicated GPU could simultaneously drive the Thunderbolt Display and the laptop's built-in panel isn't clear, but it should at least be technically possible since none of Apple's current laptops have 4K-or-greater displays.