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 67 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
Rampell: Bay Area housing prices declined massively when priced in tech stocks
“There's a piece that we wrote a little while ago showing that the price of housing in the Bay Area has declined massively in the past 25 years. If you're like, no, no, it hasn't. It's gone off. If you price it in Apple stock and Google stock, right?”
Alex Rampell: Microsoft never restricted Windows software like Apple restricts iOS
“Microsoft, in my opinion, never really They never did the same amount of control. Like, they never said, hey, this software product cannot be downloaded onto your Windows PC.”
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.”
Rampell: Massachusetts banned residents from buying Apple's IPO
“Massachusetts banned their residents from buying into the IPO of Apple Computer.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Sinofsky: Apple's quarterly device sales match the entire global PC market
“And on a quarterly basis, Apple sells about the same number of, Apple sells the same number of devices as their RPCs sold.”
Dixon: Apple is actively working on a VR product
“Apple. And we know Apple's working on something around this. I mean, we know just from the companies they bought and the people they've hired, but of course it's all mysterious as to what they're actually doing.”
Alex Rampell: Apple threatens Amazon with App Store removal over in-app purchases
“And Apple is saying, hey, you want to go buy this streaming video from Amazon? Uh-uh. Can't do it on an Apple phone. The Amazon app will not let you buy certain types of things because otherwise Apple would remove it from the app store.”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook Won Initial Mobile and Messaging Wars
“The smartphone wars are now over, or at least the first smartphone war is over, and Apple and Google both won in different ways, and the kind of the first messaging app wars are now mostly over, and Facebook mostly won in sort of various ways”
Evans: Apple controls two-thirds to three-quarters of online tablet usage
“And then there is a market for like The post-PC replacement, which is what Apple and Samsung and everybody else is trying to play in, and Apple has like three-thirds, two-quarters has like two-quarters to two-thirds of that, and if you look at all the usage st…”
Evans: Emerging Chinese smartphone makers are hurting Samsung, not Apple
“In precisely the period that you have half a dozen Chinese manufacturers coming into market with really good design and strong brand, which show me is only the most obvious, and what's happening is those guys are killing Samsung, they're not touching Apple at …”
Evans: Apple outsold Microsoft-Nokia's total handset volume in Q4 2014
“Apple sold more phones than Nokia. I mean, the Nokia, you know, this is still Microsoft, because Nokia did, Nokia Microsoft did ten million numis and forty million feature phones. Right. Apple did seventy-five million smartphones.”
Evans: Apple iPad captures 80% to 90% of total tablet usage
“The iPad share of tablet use is 80 to 90% on any kind of, or to the extent that anybody who has metrics specifically For iPad use, that is to say e-commerce sites or websites or, you know, anybody who's doing video or anyone who's actually selling anything see…”
Evans: iOS users spend four times more than Android users
“You have double the revenue on iOS for half the users, and so very roughly four times the spend.”
Evans: Apple's iOS 8 extensions lagged behind Android by three years
“And so, you know, again, it's a bit like multitasking, that Apple is doing something that was on Android like three years earlier.”
Active Android devices will reach 2-3B; iOS will reach 700-900M
“And, you know, as things play out with the current dynamics, which aren't really going to change in the next two or three years, we will end up with seven, eight, nine hundred million iOS devices in use on Earth. It's probably about 500 now. And we'll end up w…”
Rampell: Apple and Google will fully open their mobile wallet platforms
“Apple and Google need to open up their respective wallets, but I think they will, because Apple and Google, if they want to build a powerful position and actually truly have the mobile wallet not just be a payment type that has three credit cards in it, But ac…”
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.”
Sinofsky: Apple sells more iPads than total US laptop volume
“They sell more iPads, you know, than the laptop run rate in the US.”
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…”
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.”
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: 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…”
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 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…”
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.”
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 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.”
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…”