The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 309 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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 …”
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.”
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…”
Christensen: Apple risks losing its innovation edge by relying on market research
“And I worry that Apple can easily lose that and do their research by looking outside And not understanding the essence of what the job has to be, you know.”
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.”
Shirky: Treating Apple as the primary innovation archetype has harmed US tech
“When I look back at the U.S., I think that the U.S. Has been somewhat damaged by regarding Apple as our official most innovative company.”
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…”
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…”
Evans: TV industry incumbents have no incentive to unbundle traditional content packages
“The current structure of the TV industry works really well for the TV industry, and nobody has a big incentive to change it.”
Apple missed streaming music like Google missed social media
“Yeah, I mean, I think, well, for music, there's no question that music, Apple dominated music, and they missed the transition to streaming completely, just as Google missed social completely.”
Photos have replaced music as the primary mobile ecosystem lock-in
“Incidentally, photos to some extent have replaced music as a lock-in.”
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 …”
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…”
Evans: Samsung cannot replicate Apple's ability to sell a $10,000 watch
“It's impossible, effectively, for Samsung to copy that. You can argue about Apple's ability to sell a 10,000 dollar watch. I don't think anybody would argue about Samsung's ability to sell a 10,000 dollar watch.”
Chen: Apple will never make an Apple Watch compatible with Android
“So you're never, you're not going to see watch that works with an Android phone, right? Like, they're just not going to do that.”
Johnson: Apple has had no bad product launches since opening stores
“One of the values of the Apple stores over the past 12 years is Apple has really not had a bad product launch since we had stores.”
Evans: Google views devices as dumb glass; Apple views cloud as storage
“So what Apple is doing, what Google is doing is they say, well, the device is dumb gloss, and all the cool stuff's happening in the cloud. And what Apple is doing is saying, no, no, no, no, the cloud is just dumb storage.”
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 …”
Evans: Google Views Apple as a Channel, Not an Existential Competitor
“Google is not in a one-to-one fight to the death with Apple. You could argue it's in a one-to-one fight to the death with Facebook. Or even potentially with Amazon. But Apple is a channel.”
Benedict Evans: Apple and Google Both Won the Mobile OS War
“The platform war ended and Google and Apple both won, because Google and Apple both got what they wanted, but they wanted different things.”
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…”
Evans: Google and OpenAI cannot reliably execute Apple's Siri vision
“I mean, Google, I don't think Google or OpenAI could deliver the Siri demo that Apple gave two years ago. I mean, they could really do the demo, but they couldn't like consistently reliably make it work.”
Rampell: Massachusetts banned residents from buying Apple's IPO
“Massachusetts banned their residents from buying into the IPO of Apple Computer.”
Rabois: Apple is great at devices but bad at AI, Google is terrible at hardware
“Google's been terrible at devices historically. We'll see if they can get any better, but someone, you know, Apple is great at devices, but bad at AI.”
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.”
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 …”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Olivia Moore: Notification summary backlash spooked Apple into delaying AI Siri
“It seems like that spooked Apple a little bit, and they keep kind of retrenching on the timeline of releasing AI Siri.”
Olivia Moore: Apple is outsourcing core mobile AI features to ChatGPT
“It does seem like from a lot of Apple's updates that they put out, they're kind of outsourcing a lot of the true AI features to ChatGPT just running on your phone.”
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…”
Yudis: The DoD cannot outpace the commercial sector in software innovation
“And imagine if the DOD was responsible for building the phone. Versus Apple, or versus Android, and, you know, it's very hard to imagine they can outpace the commercial side.”
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 …”
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…”
Andreessen: Apple's market cap is larger than the entire German stock market
“I think Apple's market cap is bigger than the entire market cap of the German stock market.”
Hicks: DoD R&D budget exceeds Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft combined
“It's more than what Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft combined spent on R&D last year.”
Carl Pei: Tech fans feel Apple has lost its magic
“There's a lot of people like us who are tech fans out there and who remember being Apple fanboys and fangirls and now just feeling like the magic is lost and just wanting to recreate the magic.”
Wozniak: The iPhone was conceptually designed as an iPod with phone features
“And then the iPhone was even better. And it was based on the iPod, not the reverse, not a phone. And we'll include an iPod more like it's an iPod, but you get a phone with it.”
Wozniak: Memory to store a single song cost nearly $1M initially
“The amount of memory that would hold a song Haas. You know, we were back in the days of tape. It cost about a million dollars, a good fraction of a million dollars.”
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…”
Steve Jobs threatened to cancel Apple's contract unless Kotick dropped out
“I will rip, and I can't say the word, I will rip this effing contract up right now if you don't quit college. So I quit the next day.”
Apple Omitted Copy and Paste From First iPhone Due to Time Constraints
“And so we knew that we wanted cut, copy, paste, but we knew that there was simply not going to be time for it. So we didn't spend any real development effort on it.”
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…”
Safari Was Three Times Faster Than Internet Explorer at Launch
“And eventually Safari, as when it was released, it was three times faster than MSIE at loading web pages.”
Sethi: Apple Health Records is built on acquired Glimpse technology
“Tanya used Glimpse, which is a former company. Apple acquired it in a transaction, and some of the health records that we see them releasing it to the world, Is some of that technology.”
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.”