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
Evans: Smartphone camera quality depends on full computational silicon stack
“It's no longer actually the camera module. It's everything. It's the GPU and the CPU and the machine learning software and everything else that's being done in.”
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 strategy relies on building blocks, not minimum viable products
“I think Apple doesn't do minimum viable products. What they do is they create building blocks.”
Sinofsky: Android vendors will release higher-priced lower-end phones to counter Apple
“So if you actually do see them side by side, you'll, you'll see the value, which then, back to the Android thing, it's going to force them, like, I suspect we'll start to see higher priced lower end phones, like, being dug out of the parts bins from the Androi…”
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: Apple operates on a five-year product development cycle
“Apple is a company around creating a very specific kind of hardware company that has like a five year product cycle between like three years of planning and then two years of it being in the market.”
McAfee: Apple's app ecosystem is an N-sided network
“This really starts to turn into three-dimensional chess because the right way to think about the app ecosystem in Apple is not any kind of one or two-sided network. It's an N-sided network.”
Russell: A socially acceptable Apple AR headset is still years away
“You have to make a headset that you're not embarrassed to wear in public, so maybe Apple can do it but probably gonna be a couple years.”
Sinofsky predicts Apple's dual-camera hardware will trigger third-party app development.
“I suspect that this is also going to drive a wave of the apps that replace the camera app for certain high-end users to, like, go put more features in for this.”
Sinofsky predicts Apple will introduce wireless charging as a seamless full-stack experience.
“Apple is going to find a way to, again, integrate a full stack of things and not just make it technically possible, but make it somehow a uniquely positive experience, much the way that The pairing and the charging of the AirPods was.”
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.”
Evans: App Store subscriptions unlock sustainable economics for productivity software
“The introduction of new subscription pricing options last week, potentially changes the economics for a developer, because now if you're going to make a really interesting productivity app, instead of having to charge 50 dollars for it, or give it away for fre…”
Evans: Apple will wait to enter VR before releasing a market-defining product
“There'll be, my suspicion is they'll wait a while. Apple tends to be kind of a fast follower in this stuff and then come in with what they hope is kind of a market defining product.”
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.”
Sinofsky: Apple PowerPC Failed Due to Insufficient Scale vs. Intel
“This is basically what happened to Apple. It's like, it was just too small to support the innovation at the scale needed to compete with what was going on at Intel. And like, there just weren't enough electrical engineers designing chips to be competitive.”
Evans: Mobile OS platforms integrate services much deeper than PC OSs
“Unlike, say, a web browser on a, either a Windows or a Mac, where the web browser was the platform and the Windows or the Mac computer wasn't really where you were building internet services. Whereas on a smartphone, not only are you building in the web browse…”
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 will target high-end cars and avoid budget models
“One suspicion is that Apple will like the high-end Because it tends to like not making compromises on product to hit prices beyond a certain point. Right. And one suspicion is that Apple won't make a 10,000 dollar car.”
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…”
Cheney: Mobile tech lacks indoor contextual intelligence despite 80% indoor time
“There's a missing link there where there's still no layer of context in physical and indoor environments, which is where we spend, what, 80% of our time?”
Evans: Apple and Google approach context-aware computing from opposite directions
“Apple and Google are both kind of climbing the mountain. This is a thing I'm probably saying too often, but they're kind of climbing the mountain from the opposite side. So, on the one hand, you have all of these sensors, and you have beacons, which of course …”
Apple and Google are killing the ten blue links
“I think what Apple and Google are both doing is killing the list of 10 links. The 10 blue links.”
Evans: OS X is a legacy platform, not Apple's future
“That's the legacy platform. That's not the platform of the future.”
Evans: WatchOS 2 includes features delayed from original Apple Watch launch
“It basically, it looks like this is all the stuff that Apple wanted to have in the launch, but they didn't have time to make the deadline.”
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.”
Benedict Evans: Apple Watch strategy enhances iPhone, unlike Google's cloud approach
“I mean, I think, you know, to Stephen's point about platform, this is clearly, you know, and again, this is what speaks to the, again, a sort of thing I talk about a lot, which is kind of a difference between Apple and Google, which is for Google, there's a wh…”
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…”
Sinofsky: Apple products defy predefined product categories
“When Apple comes out with a new product, it generally isn't one that fits in the predefined category notions that, that people have.”
Sinofsky: Personalized tech features do not require storing user data in cloud
“Well, and I think that the, this is one where, where I think people can overstate the need for the cloud side of it, or understate the amount that they can do based, sort of, not really Cloud, but, or clients, but like on a client side way, I mean, if you thin…”
Evans: Android ecosystem struggles with integrated hardware without full-stack control
“Really hard for the Android ecosystem to deliver that, because nobody controls the whole stack.”
Chris Dixon: Tech strategy shifted from Microsoft's horizontal model to Apple's vertical
“I think there used to be the more, I think in the business theory world, A stronger belief in kind of core competency. And that people, you know, it was sort of the, it was the Microsoft model as opposed to the Apple model, right? It was like, let me do one th…”
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 Watch prioritizes consumer delight over technical specifications
“And then the watch again, it's another step in abstraction, and it's another step in the importance of delight over feeds and speeds.”
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: iPad sales are trending down with record low average prices
“For the iPad numbers and sales, it's not a record low, but sales have been trending flat to down for the last 18 months to two years, and it's a record low ASP, record low average selling price.”
Evans: Commodity OEMs cannot match Apple's tight hardware and software integration
“When you look at things like Touch ID, when you look at Apple Pay, when you look at the things that they do with that integration you know, it's very hard for a commodity OEM using somebody else's operating system and somebody else's components to compete with…”
Evans: Apple is less of a competitor to Facebook and Amazon than Google
“Apple is less of a competitor to both Facebook and Amazon than Google is.”