Apple
also referred to as: apple computer · apples
includes Apple Watch, Apple Pay, Apple TV, Apple II, Apple Store, Apple News, Apple Maps, Apple Card, Apple Music, Apple Vision Pro, Apple HomeKit, Apple Wallet and 45 more
309 statements across 126 episodes · 100 bullish · 59 bearish · 65 people on the record · first statement Jul 15, 2017 by Benedict Evans · said 2,237 times in 304 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Benedict Evans (820), Steven Sinofsky (207), Michael Copeland (205), Alex Rampell (70), Frank Chen (65), Kyle Russell (61), Marc Andreessen (52), Chris Dixon (50)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 41 mentions in 18 episodes 2 per episode
- The Economics of AI Usage and What's Next For SaaS | Benedict Evans on a16z
- Why Balaji Srinivasan Thinks the SaaS Apocalypse Is Overhyped | The a16z Show
- Why Claude Feels Different (And What That Means for AI) | The a16z Show
- Why AI Agents Could Finally Reinvent the Credit Card
- How AI Changes the Economics of Innovation
- Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | The a16z Show
- How Bots, Deepfakes and AI Agents Are Forcing a New Internet Identity Layer | Alex Blania on a16z
- AI Markets: Deep Dive with a16z's David George
- 10 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 201 mentions in 39 episodes 5 per episode
- Former Microsoft Executive on Apple’s Hidden China Problem
- AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on the Next Platform Shift
- The Lawyerly Society vs. The Engineering State: Who Owns the Future?
- Dylan Patel on the AI Chip Race - NVIDIA, Intel & the US Government vs. China
- Robinhood CEO: Making Everyone An Owner
- Steven Sinofsky & Balaji Srinivasan on the Future of M&A, AI & Tech
- Why AI Moats Still Matter (And How They've Changed)
- Keith Rabois: Israel, OpenAI, Opendoor, and DOGE
- 31 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 50 mentions in 17 episodes 3 per episode
- Politics & the Future of Tech
- The 2025 AI Search Race
- The Quest for Community-Trained Open Source AI Models
- “The Future of AI is Here” — Fei-Fei Li Unveils the Next Frontier of AI
- America Needs More Techno-Optimism, with Marc Andreessen and Tyler Cowen
- Future of Crypto, Blockchain & Web3 w/ Chris Dixon
- Marc Andreessen on Inventing The Internet Browser (How We all Access the Internet)
- Zach Perret (Plaid) & Simon Khalaf (Marqeta): New Applications in Fintech
- 9 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 65 mentions in 20 episodes 3 per episode
- Building Hardware and Taking on the Phone Giants with Carl Pei
- The Rise of the Exponential Organization with Peter Diamandis and Salim Ismail
- The State of Apps with Olivia Moore
- The Calculus of Success
- 2023 Big Ideas in Technology (Part 2)
- Dunking in VR: Inside the Future of Sports
- AI Hardware, Explained.
- The Challenge of Replicating Reality with Steve Zhao from SandboxVR
- 12 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 40 mentions in 5 episodes 8 per episode
2020 17 mentions in 5 episodes 3 per episode
2019 1,724 mentions in 171 episodes 10 per episode
- a16z Podcast | How Many Taps in the Apple (Plus) Tree?
- a16z Podcast | Apple Takes on Payments and Your Wrist
- a16z Podcast | Apple and the Widgetification of Everything
- a16z Podcast | Apple Gets Its Music Streaming and Gives News Another Try
- a16z Podcast | Apple and the Case of Invisible But Audible Innovation
- a16z Podcast | What's at the Core of the Latest Apple Announcement?
- a16z Podcast | Mobile is Eating the World (and Apple is Gobbling Fastest)
- Inside the Apple Factory: Software Design in the Age of Steve Jobs
- 163 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 24 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- Distribution, Channel & Partnerships
- Cryptonetworks and Cities: Analogies
- An Intro to Crypto: Decentralization, the Big Picture
- The Oral History of TrialPay -- Obstacles and Opportunities in Payments
- When Biology Moves to Engineering
- When Software Eats the Real (Estate) World
- The End of the Beginning
- Winning Founders & Influencing Everyone: Margit Wennmachers at Startup Grind Europe
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 75 mentions in 17 episodes 4 per episode
- Mobile Is Eating the World, 2016
- Mobile Is Eating the World, 2015
- What Happens When Mobile (Really) Hits the Wallet
- Culture and Revolution
- Jason Mars
- 10 Year Futures (vs. What's Happening Now)
- Mobile Is Eating the World, 2014
- AI: What's Working, What's Not
- 9 more episodes that year, every mention in 2017 →
Everything said about Apple, oldest first
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Jul 15, 2017 neutral
Evans: Combined GAFA revenues remain smaller than TV and advertising
“Even Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon combined there, or GAFA, as the telecoms industry tends to call them add up to less than TV business or advertising and are much, much smaller than mobile or proper, proper industries like cars or clothes.”
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 15, 2017 neutral
Jul 15, 2017 neutral
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Evans: The average Apple device generates 4x the app revenue of Android
“And then if you look at App Store revenue, you see that Apple devices contribute about two-thirds of all the revenue, and Android devices one-third. And that's even though there are at least twice as many Android devices in use as there are Apple devices. So t…”
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Jul 15, 2017 bullish
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 neutral
Jul 16, 2017
Jul 16, 2017 bullish
Rampell: Apple and Google will fully open their mobile wallet platforms
“Apple and Google need to open up their respective wallets, but I think they will, because Apple and Google, if they want to build a powerful position and actually truly have the mobile wallet not just be a payment type that has three credit cards in it, But ac…”
Jul 16, 2017 positive
Rampell: Amazon's Fire Phone was a smart move against app store fees
“Amazon, they built the Fire Phone. Which ended up being a flop, but it was a very, very smart move for Amazon to do because they realize if I'm Amazon and I want to go sell a book to somebody, I'm not allowed to do that through Apple or through Google unless I…”
Jul 28, 2017 negative
Jul 28, 2017
Jul 28, 2017
Dec 5, 2017 neutral
Evans: Dominant Tech Giants Always Look Invulnerable Right Before They Fall
“The winners always look invulnerable until they don't. So, IBM looked invulnerable, then Microsoft, Intel, Nokia did, then the internet giants of the last bubble, now Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon look invulnerable, but all the previous ones fell, and it was…”
Feb 3, 2018 neutral
Mar 7, 2018
Jul 15, 2018 positive
Stark: Big tech UX talent will solve crypto usability challenges
“Getting the folks that say maybe we're doing You exit, you know, Apple, Google, Facebook, and coming into this world that can really think through these problems and develop compelling user experiences, I think is going to be a big part of it.”
Jul 15, 2018 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Apple lacked PC market fit because corporate buyers prioritized price
“At the kind of the critical period of the PC industry, most of the sales were corporate. And corporate buyers wanted, ah, 1500 generic boxes that they would put out of people's desks. So they didn't care what they looked like. They didn't care how easy the use…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Active Android devices will reach 2-3B; iOS will reach 700-900M
“And, you know, as things play out with the current dynamics, which aren't really going to change in the next two or three years, we will end up with seven, eight, nine hundred million iOS devices in use on Earth. It's probably about 500 now. And we'll end up w…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Apple holds 10% and Android 45-50% of global phone sales
“In as much as Apple has about, well, in the launch quarter, they have about 10% of all the phones sold on Earth, and Android has another 45 to 50% although only about two-thirds of those are Google Android and one-third are in China and don't have any Google s…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Balaji: Apple's Bitcoin ban will drive users off iOS within three years
“Like, you know, locking down Bitcoin on the iOS platform is going to be, I think, seen in like three years as one of the more short-sighted things that, that could be done. Because it's going to be so, such a big deal. And so it's the kind of thing that could …”
Jan 2, 2019
Benedict Evans: Installing a smartphone app won't mean downloading code within five years
“If I was to say I installed an app on my Android smartphone in five years, I don't really know what that would mean. You know, what would install mean? You know, what would app actually mean? What would Android mean? And so there's that question. Yeah, exactly…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Dixon: Startups should outsource supply chain layers that are API-mature
“The principle they use to decide which parts of the chain they have to own and which parts they can outsource is just ultimate product. What ultimate product experience we need to deliver and which of the You know, which of the layers, Tobology's point, are ma…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Srinivasan: Apple developed MagSafe using defect data from Genius Bar repairs
“As I understand it, because Apple controlled the Genius Bar, they had people who would come in and they would be able to log all the defects that happened with Apple computers, right? And they found that a relatively small number of defects, but with a very hi…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: TV has replaced music as Big Tech's ecosystem battleground
“Music was an ecosystem battleground, and it's turned into a checkbox commodity feature that you throw into any new product as like something you have to have. You know, you're launching a phone, you're launching this, you're launching, you've got to have a pho…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jagoda: Apple built Swift for internal use, not just third parties
“It felt to me at least like they're building this for themselves as well to help Apple's own efforts as opposed to like Here's a kit. You go use this. We'll use the real, real stuff. You guys can use this sort of dumbed down limited thing. And it doesn't feel …”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: iPhone ASP is $600 compared to Android's $250 average
“They sell a phone that an average of 600 dollars, In an industry that averages about a 180, and Android averages about 250. And in the high-end space, they have, as it might be, two thirds to three quarters of the market, and Samsung has most of the rest.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Apple generates double Android's developer revenue on half the devices
“And if you look at the revenue growth rate, the run rate growth rate, that means that Apple probably paid out ten billion in the last 12 months. And there are, as it might be, four hundred fifty million active iOS devices on Earth, so Apple is doing double the…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Apple never sees health data stored in iOS 8 repository
“So Apple is making this repository in iOS eight that stores all the health information from a watch, from any wearable that you have, anything you input into it. Any app on the device can ask for that with permission. Apple never sees it”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Apple's 40% US market share forces bank and merchant alignment
“And because of the market scale that Apple has uniquely kind of in the USA with 40% of smartphones, They could then go to all the banks and all the retailers and say, this is all going to work, and let's all just, you know, get behind and push, which is kind o…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple holds only half of the high-end smartphone market
“When you look at the high end segment, that Apple is really the only place Apple competes they've probably only got around half of that segment, and the other half is high end Android, and almost all of that high end Android is with bigger screens.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple operates like a club funded by biannual hardware upgrades
“You can describe Apple as a sort of club where the price of membership is buying a new box every two years, and the benefits of being a member of the club keep expanding in terms of all these sort of incremental services around the edges.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans notes Apple provides payment endpoints rather than competing with banks
“On the one hand, they look like a great partner, because they've not gone and built their own payment platform, they're not trying to compete with Visa or Master They're not trying to compete with Chase or Wells Fargo or Lloyd's or, you know, any of the retail…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Emerging Chinese smartphone makers are hurting Samsung, not Apple
“In precisely the period that you have half a dozen Chinese manufacturers coming into market with really good design and strong brand, which show me is only the most obvious, and what's happening is those guys are killing Samsung, they're not touching Apple at …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Apple outsold Microsoft-Nokia's total handset volume in Q4 2014
“Apple sold more phones than Nokia. I mean, the Nokia, you know, this is still Microsoft, because Nokia did, Nokia Microsoft did ten million numis and forty million feature phones. Right. Apple did seventy-five million smartphones.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Commodity OEMs cannot match Apple's tight hardware and software integration
“When you look at things like Touch ID, when you look at Apple Pay, when you look at the things that they do with that integration you know, it's very hard for a commodity OEM using somebody else's operating system and somebody else's components to compete with…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Apple iPad captures 80% to 90% of total tablet usage
“The iPad share of tablet use is 80 to 90% on any kind of, or to the extent that anybody who has metrics specifically For iPad use, that is to say e-commerce sites or websites or, you know, anybody who's doing video or anyone who's actually selling anything see…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
McMaster: Apple faces margin pressure and negligible emerging market share
“I believe over time, Apple's even going to have products. You know, problems, because they're not going to be able to sustain these margins, and in these markets where Android is dominant, Apple's market share will be negligible. Right? As these markets contin…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Chris Dixon: Tech strategy shifted from Microsoft's horizontal model to Apple's vertical
“I think there used to be the more, I think in the business theory world, A stronger belief in kind of core competency. And that people, you know, it was sort of the, it was the Microsoft model as opposed to the Apple model, right? It was like, let me do one th…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: For Google, Android is a tactic; for Apple, device is strategy
“For Google, Android is a tactic, and cloud is a strategy, whereas for Apple, the device is a strategy, and the cloud is a tactic. The cloud is a feature of the core strategy, whereas for Google, the device is a feature of the core strategy.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Streaming content is no longer strategic leverage for Apple or Google
“Once we went to streaming services, it became really, really easy to switch from device to device, and so content really isn't a strategic lever anymore. It may be, we'll see what Apple does with music next week, but, you know, for the sake of argument, right …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Cloud-based machine learning is in Google's DNA, not Apple's
“On the other hand, Google finds it really easy to do image recognition in the cloud of every photo you've ever taken, because that's what Google does, and Apple conversely would find it very difficult to do that. It's But theoretically they could, but it's jus…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Benedict Evans: Apple Watch strategy enhances iPhone, unlike Google's cloud approach
“I mean, I think, you know, to Stephen's point about platform, this is clearly, you know, and again, this is what speaks to the, again, a sort of thing I talk about a lot, which is kind of a difference between Apple and Google, which is for Google, there's a wh…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Apple is on a path to untether the Watch from the iPhone
“The one thing I will say that's going to be magical is how Apple Like, evolves, their historic way of doing things has been to tether them, and then untether them over time, and so what I think is going to be interesting to see is if they can untether the watc…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Personalized tech features do not require storing user data in cloud
“Well, and I think that the, this is one where, where I think people can overstate the need for the cloud side of it, or understate the amount that they can do based, sort of, not really Cloud, but, or clients, but like on a client side way, I mean, if you thin…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Apple disrupted mobile by treating cellular networks as transparent data pipes
“One of the things that allowed Apple to disrupt everything was by saying, no, no, no, no, it's just a piece of wire, and we ignore it completely. We make zero effort to optimize bandwidth, and, you know, it's kind of an overstatement, but we just completely ig…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple and Google approach context-aware computing from opposite directions
“Apple and Google are both kind of climbing the mountain. This is a thing I'm probably saying too often, but they're kind of climbing the mountain from the opposite side. So, on the one hand, you have all of these sensors, and you have beacons, which of course …”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Evans: B2B fleet purchasing of autonomous cars neutralizes Apple's consumer advantage
“So and so that becomes interesting for Apple and potentially for Tesla, because it means that, you know, if the drivers, if the people riding around are not the people choosing these things, then maybe Apple's strengths don't really get to come into play becau…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Boneh: Big tech security teams possess the authority to delay product launches
“In big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google security teams in fact are involved in the process from the design phase, which is really important. And then if a product is about to ship out and a security, the security team discovers a big vulnerability, they…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple TV adds an SDK but leaves TV's commercial model intact
“Version two of the Apple TV is not a fundamentally new product. That is to say, it's basically the same UI concept. It's basically the same stuff, except that now there's an SDK. So to get HBO onto it, Apple doesn't have to write the app. To get X or Y or Z on…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Evans: Apple controls two-thirds to three-quarters of online tablet usage
“And then there is a market for like The post-PC replacement, which is what Apple and Samsung and everybody else is trying to play in, and Apple has like three-thirds, two-quarters has like two-quarters to two-thirds of that, and if you look at all the usage st…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Apple's iPhone Upgrade Program uses off-balance-sheet third-party financing
“It's not even on their balance sheet. It's been done by a third-party financing company and, you know, GM made with a low-margin business, and all the margin was actually coming from the financing. I don't think Apple are doing that here, and we want to have t…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Apple captured Samsung's high-end smartphone market share with larger iPhones
“Apple has always been pretty secure in its market, and then it sounds like Apple had, as it might be, a half to two-thirds of the high-end, and Samsung had most of the rest. With the big phone, it took, big phones last year, it took a lot more of that, and you…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Apple's vertical integration gives it a structural advantage over Android
“Whether it's good or not, it's the kind of thing that's very, that's much more difficult for an Android OEM to do because Apple controls the operating system and all the apps as well. Whereas whenever Samsung tries to do something like that, it only works with…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Sinofsky: Apple PowerPC Failed Due to Insufficient Scale vs. Intel
“This is basically what happened to Apple. It's like, it was just too small to support the innovation at the scale needed to compete with what was going on at Intel. And like, there just weren't enough electrical engineers designing chips to be competitive.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Mobile OS platforms integrate services much deeper than PC OSs
“Unlike, say, a web browser on a, either a Windows or a Mac, where the web browser was the platform and the Windows or the Mac computer wasn't really where you were building internet services. Whereas on a smartphone, not only are you building in the web browse…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook won the smartphone and messaging wars
“The sort of, the feeling you have in mobile right now is we're kind of at the end of one wave, and we haven't got another wave coming up yet, so we've kind of had the smartphone wars, and Apple and Google both kind of won, and we've had the messaging wars, and…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook Won Initial Mobile and Messaging Wars
“The smartphone wars are now over, or at least the first smartphone war is over, and Apple and Google both won in different ways, and the kind of the first messaging app wars are now mostly over, and Facebook mostly won in sort of various ways”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 negative
The Mobile Device Management market is broken due to OS vendors
“The answer for you is that MDM, at least in my estimation, is a pretty broken market today, and the reason it's broken is the vendors of the platforms that provide, you know, Google, Microsoft, Apple, really Apple is kind of the real, real offender here. They …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Strange: Millennials trust tech giants more than traditional banks
“There's definitely a lot around the millennial generation and how, you know, they hate going to their banks more than they hate going to the dentist. They would actually trust Apple, Google, name your tech Institute more than banks.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Christensen: Steve Jobs innovated by solving his own unaddressed personal needs
“What I admire about Jobs and his legacy is that he did his research in front of a mirror, and if I have a need in my life, and there isn't something I could hire to get that job done, I betcha that job arises in lots of people's lives.”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Christensen: Low-end modular competitors are gaining momentum against Apple
“So, historically, They've been very disruptive at every step in the way, you know, in ways that I didn't even see myself coming, but now I see modularity coming in at the bottom of the market, and accelerating the development, it's a cadence, you know.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Apple undershot its enterprise market potential by 100x
“If you look at Apple's products and their product position, and you look at their success in the enterprise versus say Microsoft which is selling competing products, you would, I would argue Apple's undershot their potential with the products they have by prob…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Smartphones act as non-neutral internet platforms unlike desktop Windows
“The smartphone itself is kind of, is a platform for the internet in a way that Windows was not. You targeted the browser, you didn't target Windows, but on the smartphone, you target the smartphone operating system, and it's not neutral. Apple and Google chang…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Mobile innovation has permanently shattered the monolithic web browser paradigm
“We had 20 years of the web browser mouse keyboard, and that was like the monolith for how the internet worked. And now we've broken that apart, and we've got all these different shards all kind of floating around and landing in different places and being juggl…”
Jan 2, 2019
Pritzker: Indonesian minister asked her to recruit Apple despite hostile data laws
“When I was first in this job, I'm in Indonesia, and a minister comes to me and says, we really want apple here in Indonesia, and would you please call Tim Cook? We'd like apple. I said, you know, look, I'm happy to call Tim Cook, but you are, Putting in place …”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans: App Store subscriptions unlock sustainable economics for productivity software
“The introduction of new subscription pricing options last week, potentially changes the economics for a developer, because now if you're going to make a really interesting productivity app, instead of having to charge 50 dollars for it, or give it away for fre…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Chen: Apple and Google have fundamentally opposing data monetization models
“Apple and Google couldn't be more different on this, and Apple wants to emphasize the difference, which is, Apple says, we make money when you buy iPhones, so we don't have to monetize you in any other ways. We don't have to look in your email. We don't have t…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple relies on third-party developers to match Google's AI capabilities
“And I think the kind of the platformization that we saw earlier is interesting as an attempt to solve some of the problems that Google is solving with its kind of pervasive, all-knowing AI, but getting third-party developers to solve those problems instead.”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Google's AI acts as an oracle, while Apple's is an assistant
“Sort of the all-knowing, wants to be the all-knowing oracle, and you can ask it something, and it will just know the answer, or it'll even suggest it before you do it. Whereas Apple, it's more like, kind of the, I don't know, it's like the servant that follows…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Chen: App discovery shifts from home screens to voice assistants like Siri
“If you think about how do you find applications and content, we've gone from, well, the start button on your desktop OS controls that, right? You hit the start button and applications show up. Then we went to mobile, which was your home screen controls that, r…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Alex Rampell: Apple threatens Amazon with App Store removal over in-app purchases
“And Apple is saying, hey, you want to go buy this streaming video from Amazon? Uh-uh. Can't do it on an Apple phone. The Amazon app will not let you buy certain types of things because otherwise Apple would remove it from the app store.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Alex Rampell: Apple's strict data privacy policy hindered its advertising efforts
“Apple is notoriously anti-data. That's the funny thing about Apple versus Google is that Apple says we don't collect any data. We don't use any data. We'll never store any data. This was part of the reason why their advertising efforts have not been successful…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Andreessen: Lacking a Smartphone Allowed Amazon to Lead in Voice AI
“And so it's sort of this ironic twist of fate that Amazon has all of a sudden taken the lead from Google and Apple Even though Amazon, you know, famously flopped with their phone, right? Which is sort of the obvious place where you would have a voice interface…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Sinofsky argues custom silicon requires a scale of one billion devices.
“Custom chips have always been a competitive disadvantage. For a company in particular, they were a very deep competitive disadvantage for Apple when the run rate for Motorola chips went down and they couldn't sustain it. And then they made the same mistake wit…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky asserts Apple's key advantage is editorializing internal prototype ideas.
“The neat thing about being a giant company is that within the company, there is a million ideas floating around and a million prototypes, and the process by which they go through this funnel and come out, that's what makes a company unique and their proprietar…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Sinofsky predicts Apple will introduce wireless charging as a seamless full-stack experience.
“Apple is going to find a way to, again, integrate a full stack of things and not just make it technically possible, but make it somehow a uniquely positive experience, much the way that The pairing and the charging of the AirPods was.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Evans argues Apple's full-stack integration creates superior user experiences over Android.
“It's something where it's easier for Apple to create a really great customer experience, because Apple knows what lens and what GPU and what image processing chip is in the phone. Whereas when you are at Android or at Samsung, you've got that kind of disconnec…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Rampell: EU regulatory hostility toward US tech giants is driven by jealousy
“I think the EU is very jealous that Google's not a European company. I think they're jealous that Apple's not a European, like, Google is bad in Europe. In my personal opinion, I don't think they're nearly the monopolist that Microsoft was like in the late nin…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Morell: Backed Apple over FBI in encryption debate to avoid vulnerabilities
“On the encryption debate, I was actually not where you would expect me to be. I was not on the side of the FBI. I was on Apple's side, because by forcing Apple to create a key for its keyless encryption, you were creating another huge security vulnerability.”
Jan 2, 2019
Wittes: Apple will lose encryption standoff in court, forcing Congressional compromise
“If they lose, I think they'll lose in litigation, not in legislation. The scenario in which Apple loses, or some other provider loses, is that they lose in litigation and then they have to go to Congress In order to change the legislative landscape to undo wha…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Harris: Negotiating mobile privacy standards with tech platforms avoided regulation
“Over the course of six months, we worked out, I think, an all too rare example of government and industry coming together to solve a problem. Short of regulation or litigation or legislation. And what we did is we came up with an understanding that would, that…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple's App Store exists to drive high-margin iPhone sales
“The classic thing that drives me crazy, people talking about Apple, thinking that the app store is like a primary revenue driver for Apple, when the whole purpose of the app store is to drive sales of a 700 dollar iPhone every two years at a 50% gross margin.”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Apple reuses 80% of its tech platform for new product categories
“And what Apple is able to do is the bet that they've made is that we have a platform that's made up of a set of APIs, a Unix operating system kernel, these ARM chips that have all of these sensors and capabilities. And it turns out the thing that they do uniqu…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: One tech giant's core strategy is another's supporting tactic
“Generally the stuff that you know, any of the stuff that's a strategy for one company is tactics for other companies. So, you know, Apple's strategy is to have an operating system, and for Apple, Google, that's just a tactic. Google's strategy is to do search.…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Tech companies pursue voice platforms due to smartphone platform envy
“The second thing is that anyone who isn't Apple or Google has major platform envy, and they want to find a way of going around that, not being, worrying about Apple or Google cutting them off at the platform level on the smartphone.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Sinofsky: Apple drives innovation by boldly cutting legacy ports from laptops
“You can actually be different, and this is something, of course, that Apple tends to do better than anyone, which is be minimal about things. Like, you know, if you're making a Windows laptop, it's, like, cool to continue to have all the legacy plugs and all o…”
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Arthur: Traditional CEOs like John Sculley struggle with tech market dynamics
“The basic game in tech is not the same as the basic game in standard production, and every once in a while you see somebody taken from the standard production side of the economy, some CEO brought into a tech firm, and they don't quite get it. The classic case…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Casado: Apple resists third-party security to protect its public image
“And I think, like, for me, like, the crowning example of this has been Apple. Any number of security vendors will tell you, like, when we try and, you know, provide a solution on top of Apple, they don't want to admit that they're insecure.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Nazarov: The tech industry overrates top-down innovation due to survivorship bias
“On the top-down approach, I think we give too much weight to the beauty of top-down. You know, we only see it when it works, that there's the genius iPod product, there's the genius iPhone product, but, you know, how many, what, how many hundreds of products d…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: Apple's 2018 iPhone lineup expands to roughly 50 global SKUs
“They've got six colors and multiple memory sizes, so you kind of count up all the SKUs they're going to have, plus the SKUs for different regions, plus the multiple SIM thing for China. They're going to have like 50 SKUs as opposed to one SKU.”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Android vendors will release higher-priced lower-end phones to counter Apple
“So if you actually do see them side by side, you'll, you'll see the value, which then, back to the Android thing, it's going to force them, like, I suspect we'll start to see higher priced lower end phones, like, being dug out of the parts bins from the Androi…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Sinofsky: Apple handles late-stage S-curve development better than any company ever
“And what Apple is doing is, like, they are at absolute peak execution of what they're doing. At the scale they're doing it, at the quality that they're doing it, and at the changes, each iteration that, that they're doing. And what's fascinating, like, I don't…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Evans: PC makers commoditized while Microsoft and Intel captured industry profits
“Apple did not win PCs. So you can all talk about whether Apple disrupted IBM, but Apple didn't actually get the benefit from that. Not in, and in fact, PC companies didn't really get the benefit from that. PC companies became low margin commodity companies, an…”
Jan 2, 2019
Evans: Dell and legacy automakers are logistics and assembly businesses, unlike Apple
“They're a logistics business as much as they are a technology business. There's lots of cool technology inside Dell as well, but basically they're an assembly business, and which is also what Detroit was, and what Apple isn't.”
Jan 2, 2019
Sinofsky: PC makers failed in mobile due to siloed structures
“The reason that there are none of the PC makers, other than Apple in a sense, are successful phone makers, is because they were exactly like Detroit. They had a graphics group, they had a peripheral group, they had an IO group, they had a storage group.”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 17, 2019 neutral
Feb 24, 2019
Feb 24, 2019
Feb 24, 2019
Apple Shipped Original iPhone App Icons at 57 Pixels Square
“The we determined that if you made a rectangle that was 57 pixels square, that pretty much everybody could tap it a hundred percent of the time. No matter where it was, again, since you were going quickly, you could tap it comfortably. And that, Number, he jus…”
Feb 24, 2019 positive
Steve Jobs Evaluated Products by Pretending to Be Customer Number One
“He was, in my view, I don't know what's going on inside his head, but just having seen him do that, having at least, you know, enough experience with him and his approach to evaluating work is that he was putting himself in the position of a customer. He had, …”
Feb 24, 2019
Apple's Small Product Lineup Enabled Steve Jobs' Hands-On Software Management
“Since there were so few products, Steve could keep tabs on what the software, ah, teams were doing. That there was this big initiative, ah, to make a web browser so he could keep his, ah, his, He could keep tabs on it. He could find the time on his schedule to…”
Feb 24, 2019
Feb 24, 2019
Feb 24, 2019 neutral
Feb 24, 2019
Steve Jobs Rejected Sales Pitches in Demos, Wanting Only Product Substance
“And so it's very, very interesting then how the demos go from that point in that he didn't want a lot of words. He didn't want a lot of, you know, used car salesman pitches, right? All he really wanted to know was what was next.”
Feb 24, 2019
Feb 24, 2019
Steve Jobs Sided With Ken Kocienda Over Scott Forstall on iOS Gestures
“And so and it also just goes to show that there could be disputes, even up at the highest level. Scott knew that I was very excited about this feature and wanted to show Steve, so he let me. And Steve was the one who had the final vote, and he sided with me, a…”
Feb 24, 2019
Apple Halted All iPhone App Work in 2005 for Software Keyboard
“Henri, who was the software engineering manager, called all of the engineers out in, out of our offices, into the hallway. We had a group meeting. Again, about two dozen people, probably even less than that, and said, okay, you all stop. Stop what you're doing…”
Feb 24, 2019
Steve Jobs Mandated Software Keyboard to Free Screen Space for Apps
“His idea was that We want, we need a keyboard some of the time, but we certainly don't need it all of the time, and so the idea of the keyboard being in software is that it could get out of the way, it could go off the screen, and which would then turn, make t…”
Feb 24, 2019 positive
Feb 24, 2019
Feb 24, 2019
Feb 24, 2019
Feb 26, 2019
Apr 1, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Apple's services transition mirrors enterprise software's shift to cloud
“Because I think that this move to services, people are just having trouble getting their heads wrapped around it, and it's a very natural progression for any company when it starts to reach a mature level, which is, okay, are we now effectively, you know, sell…”
Apr 1, 2019 positive
Apr 1, 2019 bullish
Evans: Apple services lock in iPhone users like Amazon Prime locks shoppers
“All of these services are they all bind you into the phone. And so there is a, you know, just as everything Amazon adds to Prime keeps you from cancelling your Prime account, and that drives every, drives all of your purchases through Amazon. All of these thin…”
Apr 1, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Free OS updates create better ecosystem monetization than paid upgrades
“And again, this was something Apple pioneered very early when they made upgrades to the Mac operating system free. They realize that that turns out to be a better business if you just make owning, being part of the ecosystem great.”
Apr 1, 2019
Apr 1, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Apple has roughly 360 million worldwide subscribers
“And so one thing that's super interesting, just out of the gate, is Apple has three hundred and sixty million or so subscribers worldwide. That's a sort of a vanity number because it includes subscriptions to apps in the App Store, but because Apple gets a cut…”
Apr 1, 2019 bullish
Sinofsky: Apple services do not need 900M subscribers each to be successful businesses
“They don't have to get nine hundred million people for every service. And they can aspire to that, and they can measure that But there's some point where it becomes a very good business and a very great value proposition, even for people who don't have them, t…”
Apr 1, 2019 neutral
Apr 1, 2019 positive
Apr 1, 2019 bullish
Apr 1, 2019 neutral
Sinofsky: Apple explicitly targets premium phone buyers, not the 5B global smartphone market
“Apple, first Apple off the top is not aiming for all five billion humans. That will have a smartphone. They, they've already said we're gonna only go, we're not making super cheap phones, it's not the app that way.”
Apr 1, 2019 positive
Sinofsky: Apple Card's true innovation is eliminating backend financial complexity for consumers
“Underneath every, what, there are probably, you know, a very, very small number of people at a very, very smaller number of companies that understand all the complexity that could go into delivering Apple Card. That complexity, Apple is, is erasing.”
Nov 9, 2022 neutral
Wozniak: I funded a sea-launch rocket startup with Apple's Mike Scott
“When Apple went public around 1980 our president, Mike Scott, maybe 81 or two started a little company with some people. I even, I funded into that. He's a friend. And actually we did a launch of a rocket from out at sea from somewhere.”
Dec 27, 2022
Dec 27, 2022
Feb 9, 2023 positive
Moore: Apple's iOS widget update catalyzed viral app growth in 2022
“Lock It Widget was probably the first one to explode in, in January, and then was followed by Live In, Widgetable, a bunch of other apps that really capitalized on this kind of, not a full platform shift, but kind of a, maybe an operating shift, a system shift…”
Mar 20, 2023 negative
Apr 6, 2023 negative
Apr 6, 2023 negative
May 25, 2023 positive
Ismail: Tech winners like Apple and Google succeeded by becoming platforms
“Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia all failed to become platforms, right? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all successfully became platforms, and that business model basically carries you through because now you wire yourself into the infrastructure.”
May 25, 2023 positive
Ismail: Apple's real competitive edge is its organizational design, not products
“I will argue that Apple's real real edge is organizational, because what they will do is they will form a small team that's really disruptive. They will put that team at the edge of the company. They'll keep them secret and stealth, and they'll say to them, go…”
Feb 28, 2024 negative
Mar 5, 2024
Mar 13, 2024 positive
Apr 2, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Apple aggressively abuses smartphone monopoly with 30% App Store fee
“I think that's happened on the smartphone now. You know, particularly with Apple, I think the kind of the Epic case and the Spotify cases are really great examples of that where, you know, I am fielding, you know, a product that's competitive with Spotify and …”
Apr 2, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Meta open-sources AI to prevent monopolies, mirroring Google's Android strategy
“The way Meta is thinking about this and the way that they're actually behaving and executing is very similar to how Google thought about Android where, you know, their main concern was that Apple not have a monopoly on the smartphone. You know, not so much tha…”
May 16, 2024 bearish
Horowitz: GM is vulnerable to Tesla because it only assembles cars
“GM is totally vulnerable to Tesla and BYD. This is why, you know, HP ended up being totally vulnerable to Apple because Apple was still building computers and HP was assembling computers and GM is assembling cars and Elon completely kind of re-engineered how y…”
Jul 23, 2024 neutral
Casey predicts increasing performance dispersion among Magnificent Seven tech stocks
“Now I feel like we're in much more of a stock pickers kind of market where The Magnificent Seven aren't all magnificent this year. One's down a ton, Tesla. One's down a little, Apple. You know, I think there's going to be more separation in the market in gener…”
Sep 24, 2024 bullish
Wang: Big Tech will easily recoup AI capex through core product improvements
“If, yeah, Facebook, Google, they make their advertising systems a little bit better. They can recoup billions of dollars just by the... Better performance there. Apple can easily recoup the investments if it drives an upgrade cycle. I mean, these are things th…”
Oct 1, 2024 positive
Schmidt: Nous is building fault-tolerant training code for heterogeneous devices
“We're making sure that also like the code we're writing to help to actually do this training is agnostic to the hardware and is able to communicate and operate. You can have an Apple device and an NVIDIA device training together. And this is actually the, for …”
Oct 30, 2024 positive
Balasubramaniyan: AI deepfake detection is 100x cheaper than generation
“It's way cheaper to detect deepfix, right? Because if you think about it, the closest example is Apple released its model, you know, that could run on device. And even that model, which is a small model in order to do lots of things like voice to text and thin…”
Dec 9, 2024 bullish
Dec 9, 2024 negative
Immerman: Google antitrust ruling proves default search deals were anti-competitive
“So earlier this year, Google was declared a monopoly. The court ruled that they're spending billions of dollars to phone manufacturers. In the case of Apple, tens of billions of dollars is monopolistic. It's anti-competitive and it's preventing their competito…”
Feb 6, 2025 positive
Sinofsky: AI will evolve toward local, cost-free on-device execution
“And then you look at Apple and their strategy, which the execution hasn't been great, but the idea that all of these things will just surface as features popping up all over my phone and they're not going to cost anything. My data is not going to go anywhere. …”
Mar 21, 2025
Apr 14, 2025 negative
Apr 29, 2025 positive
Horowitz: a16z top partners outperform executive teams at Meta, Google, and Apple
“If you look at the top people, you know, if you look at Martine Cassato and Chris Dixon and Alex Rampell and David Ulovich and so forth, like that team is better, like IQ wise capability wise than the executive teams of Meta or Google or Apple or any of them.”
May 30, 2025 bearish
Pande: Big Tech's healthcare initiatives will remain minor side experiments
“I suspect that for those reasons, it's something that The big tech companies will try, and we've seen Apple and Amazon and Google all dabble, but I think those experiments probably won't fit the way they want to build their company, and so I think they'll stay…”
Jun 12, 2025 positive
Horowitz: Apple's moat was full integration, not novel standalone components
“If you look at Apple kind of, and what Steve Jobs did in particular when he built the product line, there was no piece of software. There was no piece of hardware. There was no nothing that wasn't already done. Like all these ideas were done. It was the integr…”
Jun 13, 2025 negative
Jun 13, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 positive
Jun 18, 2025 bullish
Sinofsky: Apple will deploy massive robotic automation if forced to reshore
“And so what they're going to do is they're going to focus on, okay, if we have to do this, we're going to also end up with giant factories of robots or better automation or new packaging technologies that don't require as many, all this stuff that they have al…”
Jun 18, 2025
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 negative
Sinofsky: Markets face years of uncertainty over AI intellectual property disputes
“So we're in for years of kind of market uncertainty over how this plays out, and that's been a core part of Apple's advantage has been their ability to maintain the intellectual property of components and manufacturing and assembly.”
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 18, 2025 neutral
Jun 25, 2025 bullish
Roy Lee: Translucent liquid glass overlays are the future AI interface
“I think everyone's going to inevitably get the translucent overlay. This is how an integrated AI should feel, and, like, Apple shows everyone that, like, liquid glass is the translucent overlay that, that, that, that will be the form factor of AI in the future…”
Jul 30, 2025 negative
Hayes: VR headsets exist to mine every remaining waking second of attention
“And that's why VR is so important from that, because If you have it literally every second, you've just unlocked this enormous new landscape of, like, you've discovered these, like, new deep sea reserves, right? That, that no one had before the now, every, lit…”
Aug 1, 2025 neutral
Balaji Srinivasan: Startups need only one primary storyline creator
“There's two kinds of creators. There's those who are at the storyline level, and you probably only need, like, one of those per company, you know, because if you have too many very strong will personalities in a company, like, you can only have one Steve Jobs …”
Aug 8, 2025 negative
Srinivasan: Tech platforms face market constraints, but Washington DC is a monopoly
“See the thing is these platforms are at least competing with other platforms, and if Apple or Microsoft or Google makes too bad decision, Then the people on those platforms have exit, they have choice, they can move between platforms, so there's ultimately a m…”
Sep 17, 2025 neutral
Rampell: AI platforms will make marketing attribution harder to untangle
“And this is only going to get more complicated in the AI world, where, like, it might be the same thing, where it's like, Justine might have researched on Reddit, saw the Super Bowl, like, did all of these things, Asked a question on ChatGPT and then clicked p…”
Sep 22, 2025 positive
Patel: Huawei surpassed Apple in TSMC orders and market share before bans
“Yeah, well, like, I mean, like, every other, like, Huawei's beat Apple, right? They passed Apple up in TSMC orders, they passed Apple up in phone market share not in the US, but, like, in many parts of the world. Before the bans came down, and then even now th…”
Sep 22, 2025 negative
Patel: Apple has lacked visionary innovation under Tim Cook for a decade
“The reason why Apple hasn't done anything interesting in like, you know, nearly a decade is, is, you know, they've got a not visionary at the head. Tim Cook's greatest supply chain. And they're just plowing the money into buybacks.”
Sep 24, 2025
Oct 6, 2025
Sinofsky: Apple employs thousands of Cupertino-based manufacturing engineers in Asia
“Because even at Apple, the number of people that really are manufacturing people, they just happen to work in Cupertino and fly to Asian locations a lot is very, very high. Thousands and thousands of people as part of the company.”
Oct 6, 2025 negative
Oct 6, 2025 positive
Sinofsky: Apple succeeds by treating design and manufacturing as a continuum
“The reason that Apple products are what they are is because they don't see this line that people saw in the eighties or the nineties with the WTO of manufacturing is, you know, rural people on a bus doing the same operation, 12 hours at a shift, and then smart…”
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Oct 16, 2025 positive
Oct 16, 2025 bearish
Oct 16, 2025 negative
Oct 16, 2025 neutral
Oct 16, 2025 negative
Nov 5, 2025 negative
Nov 12, 2025 neutral
Rampell: Bay Area housing prices declined massively when priced in tech stocks
“There's a piece that we wrote a little while ago showing that the price of housing in the Bay Area has declined massively in the past 25 years. If you're like, no, no, it hasn't. It's gone off. If you price it in Apple stock and Google stock, right?”
Nov 21, 2025 negative
Dec 12, 2025 negative
Jan 7, 2026 bearish
Andreessen: The EU AI Act has largely killed AI development in Europe
“The EU passed this bill called the AI Act, I don't know, whatever, two years ago, and it basically has killed AI development, and, well, it's actually killed AI development in Europe to a large extent and then it even, it is so draconian that even, Even big Am…”
Feb 9, 2026
Apr 2, 2026 bullish
Blania: Iris biometrics will normalize across consumer devices with AR/VR adoption
“So actually, I think one point on Iris that I think people don't appreciate enough, and that's a bet we took back then, but it was essentially that Iris will turn out to be super normal as a modality, just because I think we will all wear AR and VR systems tha…”