Evans: Apple disrupted mobile by treating cellular networks as transparent data pipes
Benedict Evans · a16z Podcast | Location, Location, Location -- and Mobile · Jan 2, 2019 · at 5:09
Benedict Evans (a16z partner) discusses how Apple's decision to abstract away mobile network optimizations disrupted traditional mobile operators.
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“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 ignore that. We'll let Qualcomm deal with that, and what we're going to do is we're just going to treat cellular like Wi-Fi. And that completely turned, of course, that completely screwed up AT&T's network for about two years, and it completely transformed what kind of experience you would build.”
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