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 109 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Wenmachers: Apple has historically operated without hiring external PR agencies
“I mean, like, yeah, I don't think Apple has really used PR agencies. There are models where you don't have an agency at all.”
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.”
Evans: Apple controls 66% to 75% of high-end smartphone market
“And so you've got this sort of mix where Apple has got As it might be two thirds to three quarters of the high end space.”
Rampell: Apple built Apple Maps in six months and fired the lead
“I mean, if you think about what happened at Apple, Apple built Apple Maps in six months. The person behind it got fired because it didn't work very well, but that was an almost impossible job.”
Mariotti: Only 10% of Apple product components are built in-house
“Even at Apple, 10% of all the pieces are built by Apple. Actually, 90%, it comes from outside.”
Evans: Founders control all top tech giants except Apple
“And they all, except for Apple, the founders control the company.”
Evans notes the Apple Watch is the second-largest watch business by revenue.
“Apple put up a slide saying that it's the second biggest watch business by revenue between Fossil and Rolex, which is like three or four billion dollars.”
Chen: Full applications will eventually run directly inside Apple's iMessage
“It's only a matter of time before you get a full on application in there.”
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.”
Burbidge: Nearly 80% of millennials trust tech giants over banks
“Certainly more than 50, I think it was close to 80% of millennials trust the brands, you know, Facebook or Google. Or Apple, I think was the top of the pile, much more than their banks.”
Evans: Apple built tvOS architecture enabling full cable app integration
“Apple has kind of built the architecture that would let you do that. They built the architecture that would let Comcast do that, if Comcast chooses to do that, but they didn't have it on the stage.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Evans: Apple Proactive processes ML locally on-device rather than cloud
“The difference, of course, is that Apple says it's all being done on the device. It's not going into the cloud.”
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…”
Andreessen: Apple deliberately designed Apple Pay tokenization to avoid fraud liability
“Apple's very deliberately crafted Apple Pay so that they're not holding the bag. Just to be clear. There's actually a very clever technique with tokenization where it's definitely all somebody else's fault.”
Evans: Apple will capture the top 15% of global mobile users
“Apple's gonna have the top 15% 10 to 15% of all the mobile phone users on earth, and Android will have most of the rest.”
Evans: Apple drove 80% of U.S. Black Friday e-commerce spending
“They had 80% of all the e-commerce revenue on the Black Friday spending festival in the U.S., and About half of global web browsing, depending on which numbers you believe, and it could be a third, could be two thirds, depending.”
Evans: Apple sells top 10% of global phone volume, Android 50%
“Apple is selling the top 10% of all the phones on Earth, And that's growing steadily, and Android takes the next 50% of all the phones sold on Earth, and that's growing slightly faster.”
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.”
Apple acquires around a dozen startups per quarter
“And they buy a dozen startups a quarter, you know, but they spend a hundred million here and a hundred million there.”
Evans: Active iPad installed base exceeds active Mac base by 2x
“There's probably a 180 to two hundred million iPads in use now, Versus about eighty million Macs, according to Apple.”
Evans: Apple operates the world's largest installation of SAP enterprise software
“Apple's the world's biggest SAP installation.”
Evans: iPhone 6 launch weekend sales contained 25x 1995 global PC power
“If you count up all the phones that Apple sold at the launch weekend for the iPhone six, you get about 25 times more CPU transistors than were in all the PCs on Earth in 1995.”
David George: Pre-iPhone consensus models underestimated Apple by 3x
“Consensus models were off for Apple's performance by a factor of three X over four years.”
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…”
Apple Chose Konqueror Over Mozilla for Safari Because of Codebase Size
“And looking at that, it really just came down to Conqueror was one-tenth the size of Mozilla.”
Evans: Big four tech platforms expanded headcount 10x in a decade
“Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, as being together about 10 times the size in terms of the number of people that they were 1012 years ago.”
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…”
Evans: Apple's 900M active iOS devices rival 1.5B global PCs
“There's only one and a half billion PCs on Earth, and Apple has nine hundred million iOS devices out there.”
Evans: MacBook Touch Bar is powered by an Apple Watch chip
“The technology underneath it is an OLED screen, and the chip That's driving it, apparently, is actually Apple Watch, basically.”
Chen: Apple developer APIs allow on-device neural network inferences
“So what is clear that you can do with the Apple neural network stuff is you can get trained networks, and then you can run the classifiers, make inferences is what they call it if you read the developer documentation, On device.”
Evans: Apple OS X has roughly 80 million users
“So we have OSX, which is a platform that has about eighty million users”
Evans: Apple iOS has 700M to 800M active devices
“And then there's a platform with eight, seven or eight hundred million active devices, iOS.”
McKinnon: Apple Touch ID dramatically increased iPhone passcode adoption rates
“They've turned on passcodes and more people are, have their phones locked now than ever before because they made it easier. You didn't have to type in that code and now they have a fingerprint reader.”
Evans: Apple retail generated 10% of total company revenue
“The Apple retail business, which until they stopped disclosing it was about 10% of Apple revenue.”
Evans: Apple iPod lifetime sales nearly doubled the Sony Walkman
“Apparently the unit life, someone said to me, lifetime sales of the Sony Walkman were about two hundred and fifty million units. So they sell, you know, almost double, you know, the Sony Walkman.”
Evans: Apple generated $65 billion in lifetime revenue from 400 million iPods
“They sold, what was it, four hundred million of them, and they did something like sixty-five billion dollars of revenue.”
Evans: Apple sold 75 million iPhones, capturing 15% global market share
“Apple sold, getting on for 15% of all the phones sold on Earth in the last quarter, in the December quarter... Seventy-five million units.”
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”
Evans: iPad sales hit flatline while iPhone continues strong growth
“And the iPhone is growing quite strongly, and the iPad has been effectively flat for a year.”
Apple reorganized into a horizontal structure under Craig Federighi
“A, they'd moved from a vertical to horizontal integration organization. So you have Craig Federiga responsible for all the software, for example.”
Evans: Apple reported 83% of iPhone 5S users use fingerprint scanner
“And they gave a number that I think it was 83% of all iPhone five S users use a fingerprint scanner,”
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.”