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
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…”
Horowitz: Apple was three weeks from bankruptcy when Steve Jobs returned
“When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, they were about three weeks away from bankruptcy”
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…”
Evans: Apple is overtaking the entire PC industry due to mobile scale
“And Apple, which is the minority player in the smartphone business, is now overtaking the entire PC industry, again, because of these kinds of scale effects.”
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.”
Evans: Big Tech produces more profits than the entire telecoms industry
“You have a pretty safe bet that Google, Meta, Amazon Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.”
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…”
Kuyda: Apple App Store will never become social due to privacy focus
“If today the app store is very much not social and it probably won't ever be social because of Apple's mandate for privacy and how important that is for them”
Rabois asserts Apple's profits exceed Google's total revenues
“Their profits are greater than like Google's revenues or something.”
Altman: iPhone is the most incredible product in tech history
“The iPhone, I think, is the most incredible product the tech industry has ever produced, and it is extraordinarily vertically integrated.”
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…”
Sinofsky: Apple launched the iPod as a desperate Hail Mary move
“People always talk about like the brave, it's like their computer business was Dead, dead, dead. Like there was, it was like three percent share and going nowhere. So like it was like a Hail Mary. The iPod was a Hail Mary.”
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…”
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…”
Sinofsky: Apple must prioritize tuning AI models for edge execution
“The real thing that Apple needs to do is figure out what model is going to be tuned to run on their unique hardware on the edge and their unique offering or constraint, depending on, of privacy and how that plays out.”
Sinofsky: Apple sells more iPads than total US laptop volume
“They sell more iPads, you know, than the laptop run rate in the US.”
Sinofsky: The iPod launched Apple's Cupertino-designed, China-made model
“That was really the start of designed in Cupertino, manufactured in China.”
Sinofsky: Apple reached point of no return with China by 2009
“So the point of no return was basically, I would say, two years into the iPhone, the scale was such, there was nowhere else.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Krishnan: Apple Podcasts lacks algorithmic discovery mechanisms, making growth word-of-mouth
“If you look at the native podcast platform, say just Apple, there is no discovery mechanism. There is no algorithm, right? So it's really word of mouth.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Sinofsky: Premature bundling hides whether individual products have true product-market fit
“You don't prematurely bundle things, because then you really don't know if you're successful or not.”
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…”
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…”
Evans: Apple has 800M iPhones and 500M weekly App Store visitors
“Except there's now eight hundred million iPhones and over a billion iOS devices, and I think Apple said five hundred million people open the App Store every week, and so 30% of those purchases has become a real number.”
Evans: No non-telco company matches Apple's global subscriber scale
“Yeah, mobile operators, global mobile operators have got hundreds of millions. Nobody else is this big on a global scale.”
Sinofsky: Apple will eventually bundle its services into an Apple Prime
“There might be Apple Prime or something down the road that bundles all of these into some thing, but for the time being, they don't need to.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
The Original iPhone Software Team Never Exceeded 20 Engineers
“Now, eventually we wound up adding over time more people. We probably never had more than 20 software engineers and maybe 10 designers. Those two managers, and the executive, and Steve, and that was it, so.”
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.”
Apple Insists on Controlling All Core User Experience Technology
“And so the, you know, the vision for Apple back then, and even still today, Is that Apple wants to be in control of what it considers to be critical technology. It's critical to its user experience.”
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…”
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…”
Apple Maintained a Remarkably Small Product Lineup Through 2019
“Certainly during the Steve Jobs era, and I still think to today here in 2019 Apple didn't ship a whole lot of products.”
Ken Kocienda Did Not Seek Apple's Approval to Write Creative Selection
“Well, no, I didn't. I don't know if I was supposed to, but I didn't.”
Steve Jobs Personally Approved Every Engineer Added to the iPhone Team
“Steve was still personally approving every person that was submitted to get disclosed on the project.”
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: 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…”