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The Stick-Or-Scrap Edition Thursday, October 12, 2017

Don’t Trust Investors Asking How You’ll Exit To Apple, Says Apple CEO, by Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch

“If you have a VC asking you that you should get up and walk out of the room,” said Cook, qualifying himself slightly by saying that at least is what he would do if he were in such a position.

“You should not be attracted to that kind of money,” he added. “Because those people are not for growing you company and helping you — they’re for a quick buck and it’s not worth it.”

[...]

Responding to a question about how to figure out when you should stick at a product or piece of work which appears to be failing and when to scrap everything and start again, Cook pointed to Apple’s failed Cube desktop as an example of a time when, even with a lot of time and effort invested, the company had made a quick decision to kill off a product.

“It was a very important product for us, we put a lot of love into it, we put enormous engineering into it… It was a spectacular failure commercially — from the first day, almost,” he said. “And within three months we withdrew it. We had to look at ourselves in the mirror and say we missed this one.

15 Fresh Insights Into How Apple Runs Its Business, by Jonny Evans, Computerworld

The central principle to product development at Apple is to build solutions that people at the company “want to use”, said Cook. The argument is that if you want to use it, others will do so too. A second point is to make sure those products are created with care. “I think we sense care in the same way we sense carelessness,” Apple Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive, told the New Yorker.

Tim Cook On The Future Of Fashion And Augmented Reality, by Lauren Indvik, Vogue

Fashion shows are particularly ripe for AR intervention, he said: “If you think about a runway show in the fashion world, that's a great application of AR because some of these, you want to see the dress all the way around, you do not want to just see the front.” That kind of experience is all the more important now that runway shows are catering to a wider consumer audience watching online, and not just those seated in the front rows, he added.

[...]

It will also take some time before we’ll be able to scan and identify other women’s coats on our phones. Cook says the company has no plans to build the giant database of clothes, shoes and other goods that would make it possible. But Apple does plan to support companies who might embark on such an endeavour, he said. “We don't have a plan to collect all of these objects, but I know companies who are working on that for their products,” Cook said. “If you think about companies that offer a fair number of shoes, and [if a customer] sees a shoe and goes I want that one, you just want to point and [buy]. That will be a part of the shopping experience of the future, it absolutely will.”

iOS Update

iOS 11.0.3 Fixes iPhone 7 Audio And Haptic Feedback Issues, by Josh Centers, TidBITS

Apple is continuing its relentless march to deal with important iOS 11 bugs with iOS 11.0.3, the third weekly update since iOS 11’s launch. This one fixes problems with audio and haptic feedback on some iPhone 7 and 7 Plus units.

Apple Services

Ten Burning Questions About Apple's Forthcoming Video Service, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

Apple’s already got a subscription-based digital media service up and running, and it’s Apple Music. That’s where its premium video content has gone so far, so it’s fair to ask if Apple’s TV efforts will simply be added to the existing Apple Music subscription. It would certainly be cleaner and easier if Apple kept adding things to Apple Music and continued trying to grow the Apple Music subscriber base.

But I’m skeptical about this, because Apple’s got a stated goal of growing services revenue, and most of its competitors in the video and music spaces offer individual services, not a single combined one.

Apple In Ireland

Apple’s $1B Irish Data Center Finally Approved, 2.5 Years After It Was Announced, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

Apple has finally been granted permission to build its €850M ($1B) European data center in Ireland, more than two-and-a-half years after it was first announced. The decision was made by Ireland’s High Court this morning, after a lengthy planning battle.

The decision was so long delayed that Apple not only had time to complete construction of the Danish data center announced at the same time, but to announce a second one there – raising concerns that the company may have given up on Ireland.

Stuff

Spark Adds Key Email Productivity Features: Send Later And Follow-Up Reminders, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

Perhaps the most common use case will be responding to emails late at night and wanting them to send as soon as the next work day kicks off, which the Tomorrow option is perfect for. Thankfully, you can also set a custom date and time. Once you schedule the delivery time, Spark will take care of the rest.

CARROT Weather Adds New CARROT Voices, Weather Underground Improvements, And More, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

From the Personality screen in Settings, there are now a variety of new voices that can be set for CARROT, including both female and male options. Among these is FRED, the voice used for the original Mac. My personal favorite is JEEVES, whose smug butler tone makes me feel inferior in a way I thought only the original CARROT could.

Movies Anywhere App Launches With Joint Studio Backing, by Stephanie Prange, Variety

Movies Anywhere, a free app and website digital locker service, launches tonight at 9 p.m. PT, backed by four top digital retailers and content from Walt Disney (including Pixar, Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Entertainment — a combined library of more than 7,300 digital movies.

Movies can be redeemed through digital retailers Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu (owned by Walmart). Movies Anywhere is a Disney-owned entity that operates independently with input from an advisory committee with members from each of the participating studios, according to a Disney spokesperson.

Develop

Why Trello Failed To Build A $1 Billion+ Business, by Hiten Shah, The Journal Blog

Trello was so focused on building its free customer base first and monetizing later; by the time it looked to its paid subscribers, it was too late — they’d already moved on. While that makes Trello a perfect complement to Atlassian’s suite of enterprise productivity tools, it hampered the company from growing further on its own.