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The Software-Enhancement Edition Wednesday, June 28, 2023

The AirPods Max Are Getting Left Behind, So Are New Apple Headphones Coming This Year?, by Chris Welch, The Verge

Apple is working from a solid (albeit very pricey) foundation. But as with any iPhone that’s come and gone over the years, we’re starting to see that the company’s headphones can only keep up with the latest software enhancements for so long. The open question is how long Apple will wait before bringing the AirPods Max back up to par.

Apple Joins Opposition To Encrypted Message App Scanning, by Chris Vallance, BBC

Apple's statement now means that some of the most widely used encrypted apps oppose this part of the bill.

The government argues it is possible to provide technological solutions that mean the contents of encrypted messages can be scanned for child abuse material.

The only way of doing that, many tech experts argue, would be to install software that would scan messages on the phone or computer before they are sent, called client-side scanning.

How Microsoft Excel Tries To Rebrand Work As Excitement, by Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Wired

Microsoft Excel—the famed spreadsheet application with number-crunching and graphing capabilities—is the defining software of the white-collar workplace. Canonically categorized as “office productivity software,” its spreadsheet interface can be found on desktop monitors throughout commercials and TV shows as a staple of the cubicle. Along with its siblings Word and PowerPoint, Excel is the basis for curriculum material in schools and universities, a topic of academic research (which has concluded the software is “pervasive in businesses of all sizes”), and the subject of a quite simply enormous subreddit: r/excel boasts over 600,000 “spreadsheet warriors.” Somehow, Excel has also become so ubiquitous as to be recognized as a compelling setting for esports.

Notes

Apple Fails To End Lawsuit Over CEO Tim Cook's China Sales Comment, by Jonathan Stempel, Reuters

U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' decision late Monday night clears the way for shareholders led by a British pension fund to sue over a one-day plunge that wiped out $74 billion of Apple's market value.

The lawsuit stemmed from Cook's comment on a Nov. 1, 2018, analyst call that while Apple faced sales pressure in markets such as Brazil, India, Russia and Turkey, where currencies had weakened, "I would not put China in that category."

U.S. Supreme Court Spurns Apple-Broadcom Challenge To Caltech Patents, by Blake Brittain, Reuters

The justices turned away an appeal by Apple and Broadcom of a lower court's ruling affirming a trial judge's decision to prevent the companies from contesting the validity of the patents as they defended against the California Institute of Technology's lawsuit.

Bottom of the Page

Excel is so fun that, in one of my previous job, every month I will expect someone somewhere will mess up an Excel document and change all the ISBNs to numbers in scientific notations.

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Thanks for reading.