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 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
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.”
Sinofsky: Apple Watch will inspire smaller dedicated health-monitoring wearables industrywide
“But all of a sudden now, there's gonna be a whole industry that's like, wow, that, That giant thing like the size of a cereal box that monitored your heart rate might not be the best way to solve this problem. And it will benefit from the technology, but also …”
Sinofsky: Apple reuses 80% of its tech platform for new product categories
“And what Apple is able to do is the bet that they've made is that we have a platform that's made up of a set of APIs, a Unix operating system kernel, these ARM chips that have all of these sensors and capabilities. And it turns out the thing that they do uniqu…”
Evans: Beats 1 radio is marketing, not a core feature
“That feels to me a bit like the gold Apple watch. It's like, that's not the thing to focus on. It's an interesting piece of marketing.”
Evans: Twitter's watch notifications for trending terms are completely worthless
“Here are five new trending terms in Twitter, which is the thing that the Twitter app is sending me, which is completely worthless.”
Evans: Apple Watch won't fill a void like smartphones or PCs did
“And so asking, you know, what are the core use cases for this? Slightly misses the point, because it's not the one thing that you will own that fills this void in your life, the way a smartphone did, or a PC did.”
Sinofsky: New device categories succeed by doing new things, not replicating old ones
“The wave of skepticism is really fixated on this, to me, on this notion that the watch needs to do everything the way that your phone did it. And so, like, that, that problem is that is never how a new device category evolves. Like, in fact, it, by definition,…”
Sinofsky: The Apple Watch is not a smartwatch
“Well, the first thing that occurs to me is that it's not a smartwatch.”
Evans: Apple Watch at $1,000 beats traditional watchmakers on quality
“A thousand dollars for a polished stainless steel watch with a woven metal bracelet is, or a high quality leather bracelet is perfectly normal, perfectly part of the course for that kind of product. In fact, it's probably better quality than what you get if yo…”
Pande: Wearable diagnostics require AI software and datasets, not new hardware
“They've shown that the missing piece is not more hardware, but is software. The missing piece is artificial intelligence and gold standard data sets that can take what the Apple Watch can do, And make high quality predictions.”
Cardiogram predicts sleep apnea and hypertension using standard smartwatch heartbeat data
“Using that exact same data, they were able to predict whether you had sleep apnea. They were able to predict hypertension. And these things, traditionally, you'd have to have dedicated medical devices for. But just off the heartbeat data, we can predict whethe…”
Evans argues the Apple Watch's core strategic purpose is driving iPhone repurchases.
“So it can't be like your only device. And so it's, you know, from a cynical point of view, its purpose is to drive repurchases of iPhones.”
Evans: Cellular connectivity for Apple Watch will take a long time
“There's a rule, there's a law of physics problem in putting a cellular radio in there, or, and the battery to power cellular radio. And so that will take a lot, that will take a lot longer, I suspect.”
Benedict Evans: Haptic walking directions are the Apple Watch's killer app
“I found walking directions to be almost like a kind of a superpower, because instead of walking, if you imagine walking down a street, a crowded street in Manhattan, you know, and you don't know quite where you're going, and you keep pulling your phone out to …”
Sinofsky: Social norms around new technology cannot be predicted in advance
“You can't really project where the whole social norms are going to be. And like when laptops first came out, we had big fights about like whether it was appropriate to bring them to meetings or not, because it was super clear you were focused on whatever was g…”
Sinofsky: Apple Watch reading experience mirrors early BlackBerry adoption
“The watch is, is not a, it's actually a surprisingly good consumption tool, considering the form factor, and I remember I tweeted, like, it feels like the first time I got a Blackberry. You stare at this little pager thing, and you're like, there is no chance …”
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…”
Evans: Smartwatch apps fail when squishing full smartphone apps onto the wrist
“The apps tend to loop, a lot of the apps remind me of, like, using a J-Me feature phone app in 2006, where, like, you'd squashed way too much stuff down onto that screen, and I think the stuff that really works is when it's just one thing that's almost, like, …”
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 Watch avoids Google Glass's intrusive social interface issues
“Again, Google Glass didn't do anything that you couldn't do with a smartphone but, you know, it kind of tried to do it in a different way. And so does the watch but without all the kind of the glass hole problems of the sort of imposing the screen between you …”
Evans: Apple Watch Will Be Popular, But Not Universally Owned
“What you're also, I think you're also seeing is this kind of expansion into areas where it's not something that everyone will have. It's just a delightful, pleasing product. That many people will have.”
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.”