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 68 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
Dixon: Apple has not released a successful product since the iPhone
“And thus far, they haven't released really much of anything that's worked since the iPhone. So I guess we'll see how they do in VR.”
Keith Rabois predicts iPhones won't be primary computing devices in 10 years
“Where are we going to be using, you know, your iPhone as your personal computing device five years out? Maybe. 10 years out, almost surely not.”
Sinofsky: Steve Jobs framed iPhone market share by manufacturer to undercut rivals
“Steve Jobs, like, put up a slide at the iPhone launch of mobile phone share, but he very deliberately chose to measure it by the manufacturer of phones so that it diminished the share of Windows Phone. But he also could have just done it by operating system, w…”
Sinofsky: Apple argues the iPhone could not have started outside China
“Apple would just argue there was no way we could even have started the iPhone anywhere else.”
Sinofsky: Automation, not cheap labor, keeps iPhone prices low
“The reason that it's a thousand dollars, or 1500 dollars, or whatever, is because of the innovation in manufacturing. So all that needs to happen is like another step function change in manufacturing.”
Wiener: iPhone sports footage outperforms professional camera clips on Instagram
“There are some plays that we have that are shot both with an iPhone and a real camera, and we've tested this on Instagram, and it actually performs better when you shoot it with an iPhone.”
Evans: Apple's App Store exists to drive high-margin iPhone sales
“The classic thing that drives me crazy, people talking about Apple, thinking that the app store is like a primary revenue driver for Apple, when the whole purpose of the app store is to drive sales of a 700 dollar iPhone every two years at a 50% gross margin.”
James Rogers: Future household wealth will be defined by 3D printer capability
“And I think it's, I mean, I think in the future you're going to have a fancy three D printer in your home and how wealthy you are is going to be what type of three D printer you have. If you're really wealthy, you can print the latest and greatest iPhone. If y…”
Sinofsky argues iPhone 7 innovation equals the rest of the smartphone industry.
“Because the amount of innovation that's in this iPhone, you know, I would argue is on par with the entire rest of the software and hardware combination that's out there of makers and operating systems.”
Evans: Only 25% of active iPhone users have installed Google Maps
“There's probably four hundred million iPhones in use, a bit over four hundred million iPhones on use. Only a quarter of those have installed Google Maps.”
Johnson: Atlas achieves bullet-time effects using only three iPhones
“But now with Atlas, we can do this with just as few, through three cameras. So like no studio capture, no green screen, no expensive calibration. We can literally stick like three cameras on tri, three iPhones on tripods use these to take sort of a video of so…”
Acharya: Consumer app renaissance is fueled by $200 monthly subscriptions
“It's like Christmas, 2009 with the iPhone. People want to try new apps, but unlike the 99 cents days, they're willing to pay 200 a month, so it's sort of a renaissance for consumer builders, and yeah, I think that things have changed.”
Blania: Older Android phones cannot be trusted for biometric re-authentication
“With a new iPhone, you can have meaningful amount of trust against that, but with old Android phones basically not. And so yeah, you know, because like you can just you can just show a deep fake essentially either through a display or just directly injected in…”
Marc Andreessen claims the first smartphone traces back to 1982
“The smartphone was not a new creation in 2007. The first smartphone actually came out. If you trace it all the way back, it came out in 1982. But IBM actually released something that actually looks a lot like an iPhone in 1987.”
Wozniak: The iPhone was conceptually designed as an iPod with phone features
“And then the iPhone was even better. And it was based on the iPod, not the reverse, not a phone. And we'll include an iPod more like it's an iPod, but you get a phone with it.”
Casado: Zero-click phone exploits cost $2M-$2.5M on the black market
“If you were to buy on the black market an exploit to break into a phone, for example, an Android phone, it would cost about 2.5 million dollars if it doesn't require the participation of the user. If you wanted to break into an iPhone, it's about two million d…”
Evans: Apple services lock in iPhone users like Amazon Prime locks shoppers
“All of these services are they all bind you into the phone. And so there is a, you know, just as everything Amazon adds to Prime keeps you from cancelling your Prime account, and that drives every, drives all of your purchases through Amazon. All of these thin…”
Apple Omitted Copy and Paste From First iPhone Due to Time Constraints
“And so we knew that we wanted cut, copy, paste, but we knew that there was simply not going to be time for it. So we didn't spend any real development effort on it.”
Hennessy: The Apple iPhone was the true tipping point for RISC dominance
“Yeah, the iPhone was really the taking-off point. Some of the earlier Nokia phones began to use the technology, but then when the iPhone came along... Boom.”
Sinofsky: Competitor chips will lag iPhone launch and lack Android software optimization
“Those are going to ship and they have two problems. They're going to, Ship after the iPhone, which is going to be available in, like, 10 days or whatever, and they're going to be on Android phones that have no Android optimized for anything that, that they do,…”
Nazarov: The tech industry overrates top-down innovation due to survivorship bias
“On the top-down approach, I think we give too much weight to the beauty of top-down. You know, we only see it when it works, that there's the genius iPod product, there's the genius iPhone product, but, you know, how many, what, how many hundreds of products d…”
McAfee: Steve Jobs fought opening the App Store to developers for a year
“The compliments are so tricky that they actually tripped up Steve Jobs really badly. This is not lore. This is fact. He did not want to open up the app store to any outside developers. He thought he had to maintain super tight control over that digital environ…”
Casado: Companies can map rooms using iPhone speakers and microphones via sonar
“There are companies that will take, if you have your phone out, what they'll do is they will use the speaker to send out like a hypersonic Sound that you can't hear, then, sorry, they use the microphone, the speaker to do that, and they use the microphone to c…”
Lempress: Blockchain will transform the world by 2022
“I think it won't be 10 years. I think in five years we'll look back and be surprised at how much the world changed. Much You know, similar to something like the iPhone or the internet itself, how quickly things changed in response to that.”
Chen: Smartphone choice has surpassed car brand as a primary consumer identity
“It's much more important whether you own an iPhone or an Android phone and what set of apps you use than whether you drive a Ford or a BMW or whatever.”
McMaster: $50 to $75 smartphones will rival iPhones within a year
“But next year, there's gonna be 50 dollar and 75 dollar phones that are just as good, almost as good as an iPhone.”
Evans: Comparing iOS and Android to Mac vs Windows is useless
“And I'm kind of, again, I'm sort of exasperated by people who think that looking at Windows versus Mac tells you something about this, because both the iPhone business is in a fundamentally different position in the industry to where the Mac Corp position was,…”
Andreessen predicts WhatsApp, iPhone, and Android will reach 1 billion users
“And then like WhatsApp is going to do it, and then there's going to be a whole bunch of others. And I, you know, iPhone is going to do it, and Android is going to do it.”
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 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.”
Bry: Regions Building iPhones Hold the Ecosystem for Manufacturing Drones
“I always say, like, wherever they're building iPhones, they're gonna have a really good ecosystem for building drones and other kinds of electronics.”
Wickramasekara: Pharma researchers do not lack tech literacy
“I think there's sometimes this, like, unfair caricature that people in pharma, like, don't know how to turn on a computer and that the industry just, like, doesn't believe in technology and so forth. I don't think belief in the technology is, like, lacking. I …”
iPhones can now perform EKGs, manage blood pressure, and sequence DNA
“It's been fascinating to see the broad range of applications that you can do on, on an iPhone today, whether it's an EKG or to manage blood pressure, or you can do DNA sequencing even today.”
Andreessen: Breakthrough technologies always have 25-to-50-year backstories of failed attempts
“Every successful technology that I'm aware of, you know, the things that are, like, all of a sudden, like, the next big thing, like the iPhone in 2007, or, you know, just as an example they all have this, like, incredible 25 or 40 or fifty-year backstory”
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.”
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…”
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.”
iPhone Autocorrect Dictionary Lacked the Word 'iPhone' Until After Launch
“And when he said that, that's, When I knew that I was going to have to go back the next day and add iPhone to the autocorrection dictionary.”
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…”
Wilson: Top 100 mobile apps mirror top 100 pre-iPhone websites
“If you look at the top hundred mobile apps, And you look at what the top hundred websites were before the iPhone came out, it's not a very different list, right?”
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: Toy Story render farm had one-third the transistors of an iPhone
“The entire Pixar Rennell farm to make Toy Story, which doesn't look that high res today, but it's still amazing. But it was as it might be a third of one new iPhone.”
Russell notes the iPhone 6s lapped the Note 7 in app loading.
“The iPhone from last year was able to lap the Note seven that came out just a few weeks ago.”
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.”
Sinofsky: You couldn't invent the iPhone in 1950 due to system complexity
“We now build systems that no one understands, and that classic, if I could get a time machine and go back to, like, 1950, I'd invent whatever your favorite product is now, and then you realize you couldn't come up with an iPhone in 1950.”
Lawson: iPhone call apps are merely touchscreen versions of push-button phones
“If you want to make a phone call, the only change that's really happened in a 150 years was dialing with an operator, to dialing with a rotary, to dialing with a push button. Now open up the phone app on your iPhone. Super computer in your pocket. It's still j…”
Sanchez: Latinos rapidly adopt consumer technologies like iPhones
“We're fast adapters of technology. I mean, I can go into some of the poorest homes that I represent, and it's amazing that their kids have iPhones, and that they're working, and that they're texting, and so we are very good assimilators of the technology that …”