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 219 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
Evans: OpenAI's Deep Research marketing case used inaccurate mobile data
“OpenAI launched Deep Research. Their whole marketing case is it goes off and collects data about the mobile market. I used to be a mobile analyst. The numbers are all wrong. Their use case of look how useful this is, their numbers are wrong.”
Evans: Claude has virtually no consumer usage despite top benchmark scores
“It's basically, the only consumer, Claude has basically no consumer usage, even though on the benchmark score it's the same. And then it's ChatGPT, and then halfway down the chart, it's Meta and Google.”
Evans: Any entity spending billions can acquire a frontier AI model
“There's going to be anybody who can spend a couple of hundred, you know, can spend a couple of billion dollars can have a frontier model.”
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: Battery costs of $200/kWh explain why Tesla loses money
“Or is it because batteries are still 200 dollars per kilowatt hour? And that's not cost competitive with gasoline, which incidentally is also a big reason why Tesla is still losing money.”
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: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
Evans: Google generates more revenue on iOS than on Android
“You know, Google is making more money on iOS and Android right now.”
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.”
Evans: Google contracts block OEMs from selling both Google and forked Android
“Well, the problem for them is that Google's contract says you're not allowed to sell a forked and uncompatible and open version of Android. And, or if you do, you can't sell a single phone that has Google services on it.”
Evans: Tesla is outselling all other premium car manufacturers in US
“In fact, Tesla is now out selling the other premium car manufacturers in the USA.”
Evans: Gaming stream viewership is larger than Netflix, HBO, or ESPN
“Watching people play games is now bigger than Netflix, or bigger than HBO, or bigger than ESPN.”
Evans: WhatsApp rivals global SMS volume with only 30 engineers
“Even more dramatically, WhatsApp is doing almost as many messages a year as an entire global SMS system, and it's doing that with just 30 engineers.”
Evans: Telecom stocks stayed flat despite 2,000x mobile data growth
“Mobile data traffic has risen by something like one and a half to 2000 times, and the mobile networks collectively have revenue of about a trillion dollars, and they spend about two hundred billion dollars a year on CapEx, and the stocks have been flat for 20 …”
Evans: ChatGPT has 800-900 million weekly active users, 5% paying
“ChatGPT has got eight or nine hundred million weekly active users. Five percent of people are paying.”
Evans: Unsubsidized Android smartphones cost as little as $30 in rural Uganda
“But you can get an Android phone for 30 dollars today. Not 30 dollars with subsidy and contract. 30 dollars cash in a market in rural Uganda. You can buy an Android phone for that.”
Evans: 3.5 billion people worldwide own a smartphone as of 2018
“You can get a cheap Android phone for well under 50 dollars now, and so that technology is just, which is why there's now three and a half billion people on earth who have a smartphone, and so the technology just gets stuff used.”
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: 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: 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”
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: Apple Has 700-750 Million Active Devices and 66% App Revenue
“The Apple ecosystem has 700 to seven hundred and fifty million active devices at the moment, and it has two thirds of app store revenue, and it has roughly half of web traffic, so it has sufficient scale to attract developers.”
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: Nintendo Wii failed long-term because non-gamers bought no additional software
“The problem the Wii had was it turned out that they were selling games to people who didn't like games, and people bought it for the game that was bundled, and then never bought any more games. So we just basically, it looked like this huge success, and then i…”
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: WhatsApp processes 50% more messages than global SMS with 40 staff
“WhatsApp going to seven or eight hundred million users with a team of 30 or 40 people, and WhatsApp doing 50% more SMSs than the entire global telecom system, sort of 50% more messages than the entire global SMS system with 30 or 40 people”
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.”
Apple Maps has 3.5x more iOS users than Google Maps
“That Apple Maps has three and a half times more users than Google Maps on iOS.”
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: 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 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: 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…”
Bezos reinvests hundreds of billions into Amazon's infrastructure over holding cash
“And for Amazon, you've got exactly the opposite story, that instead of taking, putting a hundred and fifty billion dollars in the bank, he's put a hundred and fifty billion dollars into building new warehouses, and AWS, and new countries, and new categories, a…”
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 predicts active iOS and Android devices will reach four billion globally
“And we'll go to four billion iOS and Android.”
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.”
Evans: BBC iPlayer peak streaming lags traditional TV 750K to 25M
“Peak viewing for iPlayer which is basically all the BBC's content is, like, 750,000 streams, and peak TV viewing is, like, twenty-five million, and the peak, the TV viewing isn't going down, and the iPlay viewing is, well, it's kind of going up a bit, but it a…”
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…”
Evans: Android E-Commerce Basket Sizes Are Half of iOS
“Basket size or an e-commerce transaction or, you know, payment rate on Android that's half what you see from iOS, and that's, as I said, it's really just a function of price.”
Evans: Most people are online, but most economic activity remains offline
“And so most people are online, but most of the money is not.”
Evans: Netflix and Amazon match top US media content budgets
“Netflix and Amazon are now top tier content producers. They have equivalent budgets to the other major US entertainment companies.”