To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s greatest and most vital tales delivered to your inbox day by day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe right here.

Glad new week! Do you know that TechCrunch has a bunch of fantastic newsletters that aren’t this one? Should you’re into transportation, don’t miss Kirsten’s The Station. Greg writes our weekly Week in Evaluation (with Kyle at present filling in whereas Greg is on paternity go away); Sarah does the This Week in Apps publication; Mary Ann writes The Interchange, which is our fintech publication; and Darrell does the TechCrunch Podcast, which is type of like a weekly publication, however for the holes on the aspect of your head, somewhat than the entrance ones. And there are much more than that, so go get ’em! — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Prime 3

• Brian could have discovered the proper MacBook: Brian offers us the ins and outs of the brand new Apple MacBook Professional 14-inch M2 Max, during which he writes, “It’s a reaffirmation of the ‘Professional’ in MacBook Professional: chunky, heavy, blazingly quick, stuffed with ports and filled with the most effective the corporate has to supply.” This may be the 2023 model of “Mikey likes it!” In the meantime, Matt evaluations the 2023 Mac Mini, what he calls “a critical contender with the M2 Professional.
• Appears like extra layoffs: One other tech firm reveals that its eyes have been greater than its abdomen in relation to hiring. This time, Spotify is the one reducing jobs, Romain experiences. The music streaming firm will lay off about 600 folks, or 6% of its workforce.
• Give ’em one thing to ChatGPT about: After a lot hypothesis, Microsoft confirmed that it’ll make investments an undisclosed variety of billions in OpenAI, thus extending the businesses’ partnership. Kyle has extra.

Startups and VC

TechCrunch Stay is coming into its third season, and Matt is, frankly, ludicrously psyched to be main the occasions once more this 12 months. The primary occasion is on February 1, 2023, and can function a well timed dialogue on what to do if your organization can’t elevate a Collection A. Cambly’s Sameer Shariff and Benchmark’s Sarah Tavel are talking on the first one — keep tuned for what’s coming down the pike!

And we now have 5 extra for you:

Failures are invaluable IP: Defend your startup’s detrimental commerce secrets and techniques

Patent functions and GitHub codespaces are apparent items of mental property, however so are the embarrassing errors and lifeless ends that each firm encounters.

Rivals can be taught quite a bit from rivals’ failed A/B checks, unsuccessful electronic mail campaigns and wasted engineering cycles, writes Eugene Y. Mar and Thomas J. Pardini, attorneys with Farella Braun + Martel LLP in San Francisco.

On this put up, they provide recommendation for safeguarding your “detrimental know-how,” together with common suggestions for outlining and managing commerce secrets and techniques.

Three extra from the TC+ staff:

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup groups get forward of the pack. You may enroll right here. Use code “DC” for a 15% low cost on an annual subscription!

Huge Tech Inc.

Simply when Salesforce thought it was protected to return within the water, the corporate now has an activist investor coming in and taking a multibillion-dollar stake. Ron writes that whereas Elliott Administration is trying ahead to working with Salesforce, there may very well be one thing else behind it: “Elliott sometimes takes a stake in an organization to make modifications in the way in which the corporate operates with the objective of reducing prices and rising shareholder worth. In some circumstances, it tries to push CEO modifications and even promote the corporate, though that appears much less doubtless on this case.” You be the choose.

And we now have 5 extra for you: