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ExtraBITS for 29 August 2016

In ExtraBITS this week, Apple announces the date of its next big media event, we look back at Tim Cook’s fifth anniversary as Apple’s CEO, and John Gruber reflects on the demise of the Vesper note-taking app.

Apple Event Scheduled for 7 September 2016 — Apple has sent out invitations for its fall media event, which will be held on 7 September 2016 at 10 AM PDT at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. We’ll be watching the event’s live stream and chatting with TidBITS readers in SlackBITS; feel free to join us! We expect to see new iPhone models and possibly an update to the Apple Watch, but we’re also hoping for some additional surprises.

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Charting Tim Cook’s 5-Year Anniversary as CEO — As of this week, Tim Cook has been the permanent CEO of Apple for five years, which gives the punditocracy an excuse to opine ad nauseam about whether Cook is Apple’s best CEO ever or a poor excuse for Steve Jobs. Our take: let the numbers speak for themselves. Charts developed by Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research show just how Apple has evolved over the past five years. You can see just how dominant iPhone unit sales and revenues are, how the Services category is growing, the importance of China to Apple’s
fortunes, and more.

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John Gruber’s Postmortem of Vesper — It’s always fascinating to read an insider’s perspective, and doubly so when it comes from someone whose day job is industry analysis. That combination makes John Gruber’s postmortem of Vesper on Daring Fireball all the more interesting for those curious about what makes some apps succeed and others fail. Vesper was a note-taking app developed by Q Branch, a company made up of Gruber, designer Dave Wiskus, and developer Brent Simmons, who is well known for apps such as Glassboard, MarsEdit, and NetNewsWire. Gruber attributed Vesper’s failure to generate enough
revenue to bad timing with regard to iOS 7, shipping the iPhone app before the Mac app, competition from Apple’s Notes, and not switching to a subscription model. His evaluation should be required reading for any developer considering making a productivity app for the Apple ecosystem.

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