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 97 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 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
Benedict Evans: Apple will be the company to kill native apps
“Who is it that's going to kill the native app? It's going to be Apple. Apple is the company.”
Evans: Tech industry will spend $1T to $2T on AI CapEx
“Over the next couple of years, we've got like a trillion or two trillion dollars of capex coming down the pipe, and the models get a hundred x, 200 x, if it's more efficient every year.”
Evans: Only 3 to 6 companies will build frontier AI models
“You're going to have, pick a number, three to six companies making a frontier model. Spending, no one knows, no one honest knows, like something between two hundred billion dollars and two trillion dollars a year on building these models.”
Evans: AI will drive 10x to 100x increase in total software creation
“What does this do to software, and the answer is, more software, like, way more software. I mean, all software companies exist to solve problems created by other software companies, and that was the joke in security, like, All security software exists to solve…”
Evans: The AI market will inevitably form a financial bubble
“Well, deterministically, very new, very, very big, very, very exciting, world-changing things tend to lead to bubbles. And you, I don't think anybody would dispute that you can see some bubbly behavior now, and, you know, you can argue about what kind of bubbl…”
Evans: AI features will not commoditize premium smartphone hardware
“Am I going to buy the one that's a 10th of the price and just use the LLM on it? No, because I'll still want the good camera and this good screen and the good battery life.”
Evans: On-device AI models will fail as capability gains outpace compression
“Will we have small models running on devices? No, because the small models, the capabilities are moving too fast for the small models to shrink the small model onto the device.”
Evans: Tech dominance cycle will eventually turn for Big Tech
“It's not apparent how that cycle would turn for Google or Apple or Facebook or Amazon, but it will turn.”
Evans: If Daydream succeeds, Oculus risks becoming a subscale Android fork
“And so if there's a hundred Daydream devices, then the Facebook product, you could argue, ends up looking a bit like Kindle Fire. It's sort of subscale, squeezed out fork, and no one bothers developing for it.”
Evans: Smartphones will eat mass-market virtual reality
“Well, I think the basic story here is smartphones eat VR.”
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.”
Evans: There are even odds Windows Phone disappears within a year
“It's, that, that, I would be, I think there's even odds that that product won't exist in a year.”
Evans: Smartphones will dominate VR hardware within five years
“On like a five-year view, it seems to me that this is all going to be about smartphones, because just Moore's law will drive this, and the graphics and the sensors will get there”
Evans: Wintel Platform Share Will Decline to 10% of Computing Market
“The Wintel ecosystem now, as a percentage of total computing, so including tablets and smartphones and everything else, is now sort of 15% of unit sales, and it's going to go down, it's going to go maybe not 10%, but you know, it may go down to 10%”
Evans: Self-driving car insurance will cost half as much due to safety
“And those cars don't have a driver, and the insurance probably costs half as much because self-driving cars don't have accidents in the same way, because the error rate will be lower, and so the price of those self-driving, of those on-demand services will be …”
Evans: Autonomous cars will shrink personal vehicle ownership significantly
“The point is that self-driving cars, therefore, make on-demand services much, much, much bigger, and they tend to result, therefore, in many fewer people owning a car.”
Evans: Autonomous vehicles will travel in 150 mph highway pelotons
“You could start having pelotons of cars. So you've got 15 cars all going down the highway two feet behind each other at a 150 miles an hour.”
Evans: Automakers will not be disintermediated by software providers
“Car is still basically kind of about driving, at least until we've got self-driving cars, and even then, you know, it's all basically about how you put the bits of metal together. So I don't think I think they're going to be squeezed out in quite the same way,…”
Evans: Mobile apps will be re-bundled within five years
“We've had this massive unbundling, and that unbundling is getting more and more complex and sophisticated, and it's all going to get bundled back up again at some point, in some way, in like five years.”
Evans: Crypto and machine learning will shift tech away from centralization
“Now we have two new fundamental layers. We have crypto, and we have machine learning, which among other things will swing away from centralization.”
Evans: Everything the internet did to media will happen to retail
“Everything that the internet did to media will happen to retail.”
Evans predicts Level 5 autonomous vehicles are 5 to 10 years away
“And that level five is probably five to 10 years away with the emphasis on 10 years, depending on who you talk to.”
Evans: Continuous AI scaling could eliminate human software coding
“Cause in principle, if the models keep scaling, nobody's going to write code anymore. You'll just, I say to the model, like, Hey, can you do this thing for me?”
Evans: Auto and electronics supply chains will reorient to EVs in 5–10 years
“It seems pretty clear to me that on a, like a five or 10 year view, and bear in mind cars are on a five to 10 year replacement cycle, so it doesn't have to happen that quickly there will, the entire car supply chain will have reoriented around electric, and ev…”
Evans: Electric vehicle powertrains will become a commodity over time
“It seems pretty clear electric is a commodity over time.”
Evans: The cheapest GM EV will match Tesla acceleration within 10 years
“You do understand in 10 years, The crappiest GM car you can buy will have the same acceleration.”
Evans: Smart home ecosystems will always remain fragmented and messy
“The reality is you'll buy one thing now, and in five years' time, you'll buy another thing, and 15 years after that, so you'll have all these. And so this kind of brings us back to the stuff we were talking about at the beginning, which is you have the big com…”
Evans: Business workflows will inexorably shift away from traditional PCs
“And that's, that will inexorably move away from PC, keyboard, mouse.”
Evans predicts the iPhone 7 will be the best camera most own.
“The iPhone is basically going to be the best camera anybody's that most people have ever owned. Nevermind the best smartphone, it's all the best one they've got in their pocket. It will be the best camera they've ever owned, period.”
Evans predicts Apple VR and cars are two to four years away.
“The two big things that are next for Apple are on the one hand VR, or potentially AR, and then on the other hand cars. But just from looking at the state of the technology, but those are both basically two, three, four years away.”
Evans: Installing a mobile app will lose meaning within five years
“If I was to say I installed an app on my smartphone in five years time, I don't quite know what that word would mean.”
Evans: Global iOS and Android devices will reach five billion
“There's one and a half billion PCs on Earth. There's three billion iOS and Android devices on Earth. We'll go to five billion.”
Evans: Electric vehicles will collapse discrete hardware systems into unified software
“What happens to cars is, as you go to electric, among other things, is that an awful lot of the things in a car that is discrete systems from discrete vendors or discrete teams is, Get collapsed into software running on just one box, or just two boxes, or some…”
Evans: Apple will eventually release a $300 iPhone
“They could do a 300 dollar phone now that would be a great phone. It would, you would not feel, ah, Johnny, I wouldn't feel ashamed of it. I feel like that's a question of when rather than if”
Benedict Evans: Global active smartphones will reach 5 to 6 billion
“Almost all of those will become smartphones in the next couple of years, or well over a billion are now, and so we'll go to two billion smartphones if you add in tablets, maybe two and a half, as opposed to three hundred million PCs, And we'll go to five to si…”
Evans: In-car software will shift from automakers to smartphone ecosystems
“Software in the car, and how that becomes something that isn't made by the car company anymore, perhaps, and becomes something that gets into the smartphone ecosystem.”
Evans: Autonomous vehicle fleets will be bought like corporate IT hardware
“They're not getting chosen based on how nice it feels when you slam the door and, you know, the diamond cut chamfered edges. They're getting bought in the same way that Hertz buys cars, and they're getting bought in the same way that a big company buys PCs. Th…”
Evans: B2B fleet purchasing of autonomous cars neutralizes Apple's consumer advantage
“So and so that becomes interesting for Apple and potentially for Tesla, because it means that, you know, if the drivers, if the people riding around are not the people choosing these things, then maybe Apple's strengths don't really get to come into play becau…”
Evans: Autonomous vehicles will eliminate the need for traffic stoplights
“If you had no manually driven cars on the road, then you don't need stoplights anymore, and the cars can just stream through all the junctions, snag in before and behind each other.”
Evans predicts global hardware will settle at 4 to 5 billion smartphones
“There's probably two billion smartphones on earth today, maybe two and a half billion, and the great majority of those mobile phones will convert. And so we'll end up with something like one and a half billion PCs and four to five billion smartphones and those…”
Evans: iOS split-screen multitasking will not reignite iPad sales growth
“It's not going to, you know, suddenly reignite sales of iPad growth sales growth, but, you know, it may change what it means to use it a bit.”
Evans: Google could move to a web-only Chrome phone within five years
“It's entirely possible that in five years' time, Google's mobile story is a Chrome phone that only runs web apps.”
Evans: Chinese smartphone makers lack distribution to enter the US market
“There's a bunch of Chinese people who are making very interesting, well-designed phones, but they are, don't, they don't have global distribution, they don't have the ability to come to market in the US for the next couple of years”
Evans: Global smartphone adoption will reach 4 billion devices
“And we'll go to four billion. There's about three and a half to four billion people on Earth today who have a mobile phone. There's a lot more SIM cards, but there's three and a half to four billion people on Earth today who have a mobile phone. And that will …”
Evans: 4 to 4.5 billion adults globally will be online
“What's actually happening is that there are five billion adults on Earth, and four to four and a half billion of them will be online, and basically the only people who are not online are the people who are not economically active or who are basically being sho…”
Evans predicts active iOS and Android devices will reach four billion globally
“And we'll go to four billion iOS and Android.”
Evans: Android Auto won't take off fast due to car replacement cycles
“The challenge is, you know, ten-year replacement cycles, so it's not going to take off.”
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…”