• Apple has announced its new phones: The iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and the iPhone Air.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These start at eight times the price of my Moto G14 from last year, and with the 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max go up to 21 times the price - ranging from very expensive to painfully expensive.
  
  The iPhone 17 and iPhone Air feature the new six-core A19 chip, while the Pro and Pro Max feature the new six-core A19 Pro chip.
  
  Yeah, Apple is really phoning it in with this announcement.
  
  ...
  
  Sorry.

• Microsoft is battling those cheap key resellers in court, arguing that its software licenses can't be resold because they do not license the software.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically that yes they license the software but only the software, not, for example, the user interface that allows you to use the software.
  
  Apparently the key resale market is enabled by European law and Microsoft wants desperately to kill it, but this argument is far worse than the disease itself.
  
  
  
• Claude can now use Excel.  (Anthropic)
  
  Making it so that AI can drive programs that actually work rather than attempting to do everything itself and inevitably getting it wrong is a potentially positive step, though I'm not sure it's worth $115 billion.
  
  
  
• HHS has asked all employees to start using ChatGPT.  (404 Media)
  
  Blergh.
  
  
  
• Intel has fired its CEO of Products.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel had a CEO of Products?
  
  
  
• The US government has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, siding firmly with Cox against the $1 billion decision against it from a jury verdict in the inferior courts, since upheld by the Fourth Circuit.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Pinterest have also sided with Cox.
  
  So have AT&T and Verizon, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Library Association, Re:Create, Public Knowledge, the CCIA, the ACLU, a collection of legal scholars, the Internet Society, and the platform formerly known as Twitter.
  
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga Tab is a smaller, cheaper, and, oddly, higher resolution version of the existing Yoga Tab Plus.  (Liliputing)
  
  Scaled down from 12.7" to 11.1" - making it pretty standard for a full size tablet and almost exactly the same size and weight as the budget Idea Tab I mentioned a couple of days ago - it also boasts a 3200x2000 display, which is so sharp you could cut yourself.
  
  It features a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 12GB of RAM, the same as my Legion Tab, putting it in pretty serious performance territory too.
  
  Price is expected to be $550 when it ships next month.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude