The Calls
Dated predictions and their status, on one timeline. Left of today: already assessed. Green held up, red didn't hold up, amber partly. Right: still open; when a dot's date hits, the ledger checks it again against the public record.
Everyone Marc Andreessen (14)Benedict Evans (13)David George (9)Ben Horowitz (8)Jared Isaacman (7)Dylan Patel (6)Alex Rampell (6)Frank Chen (5)Gavin Baker (4)Chris Dixon (4)Vijay Pande (3)Qasar Younis (3)
drag to pan · pinch, buttons, or ⌘/ctrl scroll to zoom
Next up (2)
305 days left 2027-07-15
Due for another look (1)
Evans: Chinese smartphone makers lack distribution to enter the US market
“There's a bunch of Chinese people who are making very interesting, well-designed phones, but they are, don't, they don't have global distribution, they don't have the ability to come to market in the US for the next couple of years”
Closed calls (32) the full record →
Evans: On-device AI models will fail as capability gains outpace compression
“Will we have small models running on devices? No, because the small models, the capabilities are moving too fast for the small models to shrink the small model onto the device.”
Evans predicts global smartphone ownership will double to 5 billion
“About two and a half billion people have smartphones, and that will go to five billion smartphones.”
Evans: Consumers will soon pay Apple $100 a month for subscriptions
“You could probably, pretty soon you'll be able to pay Apple a hundred dollars a month in subscriptions.”
Evans: Rollable TVs will hit the consumer market by 2022
“In two and three years time, you will be able to buy something that's three foot long. You put it on a shelf. When you want to watch TV, you press a button and a TV is there five seconds later.”
Evans: Smartphones will eat mass-market virtual reality
“Well, I think the basic story here is smartphones eat VR.”
Evans: Apple and Facebook will build full-stack VR while Google commoditizes hardware
“You'll have Apple and Facebook trying to do the full stack, and you'll have Google saying, well, we're going to provide the hard bit, and everything else will be a commodity around it.”
Evans: Global iOS and Android devices will reach five billion
“There's one and a half billion PCs on Earth. There's three billion iOS and Android devices on Earth. We'll go to five billion.”
Evans: Over four billion adults globally will own smartphones by 2020
“That means that by 20 20 of about seven billion people on earth and a bit over five billion adults, over four billion will have a mobile phone, and almost all of those will have converted to a smartphone”
Evans: Smartphones will dominate VR hardware within five years
“On like a five-year view, it seems to me that this is all going to be about smartphones, because just Moore's law will drive this, and the graphics and the sensors will get there”
Benedict Evans: Global active smartphones will reach 5 to 6 billion
“Almost all of those will become smartphones in the next couple of years, or well over a billion are now, and so we'll go to two billion smartphones if you add in tablets, maybe two and a half, as opposed to three hundred million PCs, And we'll go to five to si…”
Evans: Wintel Platform Share Will Decline to 10% of Computing Market
“The Wintel ecosystem now, as a percentage of total computing, so including tablets and smartphones and everything else, is now sort of 15% of unit sales, and it's going to go down, it's going to go maybe not 10%, but you know, it may go down to 10%”
Evans predicts Apple VR and cars are two to four years away.
“The two big things that are next for Apple are on the one hand VR, or potentially AR, and then on the other hand cars. But just from looking at the state of the technology, but those are both basically two, three, four years away.”
Evans: Early autonomous vehicles will navigate independently, not in city meshes
“The first self-driving car is not going to be part of a mesh of every car in the city. You're going to get into the car and say, I want to go here, and it will have to work out how to get there.”
Evans predicts global hardware will settle at 4 to 5 billion smartphones
“There's probably two billion smartphones on earth today, maybe two and a half billion, and the great majority of those mobile phones will convert. And so we'll end up with something like one and a half billion PCs and four to five billion smartphones and those…”
Evans predicts TVs will become secondary display screens controlled by smartphones
“For the vast majority of people, the TV will be done whilst for the smartphone. Rather than, so it won't be a box that's plugged into your TV that runs your whole digital experience.”
Evans: The next billion internet users will be driven entirely by smartphones
“And then the next few years, we'll add another billion and all of that growth will be driven by smartphones.”
Evans: Most Sub-Saharan Africans will gain 3G coverage within years
“Even in Sub-Saharan Africa, 70% of the population is now under cellular coverage, and in the next few years, most of those people will get three G coverage as well.”
Evans: Global smartphone adoption will reach 4 billion devices
“And we'll go to four billion. There's about three and a half to four billion people on Earth today who have a mobile phone. There's a lot more SIM cards, but there's three and a half to four billion people on Earth today who have a mobile phone. And that will …”
Evans: 4 to 4.5 billion adults globally will be online
“What's actually happening is that there are five billion adults on Earth, and four to four and a half billion of them will be online, and basically the only people who are not online are the people who are not economically active or who are basically being sho…”
Evans: Most sub-Saharan African cell coverage will be 3G within five years
“Even in sub-Saharan Africa, 70% of the population is under cellular coverage, and most of that will get three G in the next five years, and 40% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa has a cellular phone today.”
Evans predicts one billion people will first experience the internet via smartphones
“There's going to be a billion people whose first experience of the internet, or the first experience of owning a device that can use the internet, is going to be a smartphone.”
Evans predicts active iOS and Android devices will reach four billion globally
“And we'll go to four billion iOS and Android.”