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 95 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
Steve Jobs Lawsuit Threats Kept Pinch-to-Zoom Off Early Android Devices
“So Steve Jobs threatens to sue Google over implementation of multi-touch gestures. And so, as a result, Android for several years doesn't have things like pinch to zoom or the sort of swipe operating system UI navigation gestures, and I'm pretty sure if you re…”
Microsoft Would Have Won Mobile OS Licensing Without Google Buying Android
“If they don't buy Android and they don't get started basically in the month that they did, this market belongs to Microsoft.”
Ballmer: Apple services is just iPhone monetization, not a new platform
“It's an additional monetization model, but it's not a new locomotive. A locomotive is a, the business that can pull the cabooses and the locomotive remains the phone. You know, the services business go away pretty quick if the phone volume fell apart.”
Chang: TSMC matched Intel in technology and beat it in manufacturing in 2011
“Technology. At that time, we thought we were almost at par with Intel. Almost. In fact, I thought we were, I think I thought we were at par with Intel at that time. Manufacturing. I thought we were better than Intel. And customer trust. We thought that our cus…”
Gilbert: Apple's ATT was net value destructive rather than captured by Apple
“And what ended up actually happening from ATT? It's been value destructive. Overall, because I don't think the amount of money that has shifted away from Facebook has been captured by Apple.”
Zuckerberg: Meta might be twice as profitable if it owned mobile platforms
“You know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various, like, taxes that the platforms have to, like, when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we thi…”
Zuckerberg: Goal for next 10-15 years is building winning open platforms
“Part of my goal for the next 1015 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry.”
Zuckerberg: Apple is Meta's primary competitor in ideological open-vs-closed race
“I expect them to be our primary competitor, and I think it will not be Just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be”
Zuckerberg: Meta might be twice as profitable if it owned the platform
“I, it's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be, like, twice as profitable if we own the platform or something.”
Zuckerberg: Apple will be Meta's primary rival in ideological platform war
“I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor, and I think it will not be Just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the …”
Zuckerberg: Meta's shipping culture is the opposite of Apple's polished approach
“I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple, and clearly their stuff has worked really well too, right? But I mean, they take this approach, it's like, we're gonna take a, like, a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out and maybe…”
Gilbert: Microsoft's 1997 Office commitment and investment saved Apple from bankruptcy
“Which, by the way, saved Apple. The company would have been completely out of business because it was so existentially important to anyone using an Apple computer to use Office that if Office, you know, Microsoft decides, oh, we're gonna stop developing Office…”
Investors need significant participation in a few top market leaders
“What everybody has learned is that everybody needs some significant participation in the 12 companies that do better than everybody else. And you need two or three of them at least.”
Rosenthal: Apple has been a terrible steward of the podcasting industry
“Apple has been such a terrible steward of this industry.”
Thompson: Apple's privacy changes enhanced Meta's long-term ad moat
“The Apple changes were very devastating, and they're structurally devastating, and so they deserve a significant haircut on their valuation because of that, but I also think they were moat-enhancing in the long run, where I question whether any other company i…”
Johns: Major technological shifts require vertical integration rather than horizontal efficiency
“When technology changes, like, I just didn't have a concept for the smartphone. So technology was about to change quite a bit. And in that change, you really want to be vertically integrated because you're not pushing efficiency. You're pushing sort of product…”
Pixar's IPO made Steve Jobs a billionaire, creating more wealth than Apple
“Pixar closes its first day of trading, At a one and a half billion dollar market cap, this is how big a hit Toy Story was and how much it was in the public consciousness. This is how Steve Jobs becomes a billionaire... He didn't make anywhere near that kind of…”
Alphabet generates more net income than any other U.S. company
“Google, and I should say Alphabet today, generates more net income or profit than any other U.S. Company. More than Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway.”
Chang: Apple placed initial 16nm chip orders with Samsung over TSMC
“I mean, it was a real shock when I heard that Apple had placed their first orders of 16 with Samsung.”
Rosenthal: Without ARM, Intel probably would make all iPhone chips
“Like, if ARM hadn't become such a viable CPU architecture platform, and Apple hadn't standardized, you know, their Apple Silicon on ARM, Probably Intel would be making all of the chips that go into your iPhone, all the leading edge chips that go into your iPho…”
Chang: Eliminating TSMC's dividend for Apple would have crashed the stock
“About one-third of our investors, shareholders, are very seriously interested in the dividends. So if we do what the Jeff Williams said, oh, a stock is going to drop like hell, you know.”
Chang: TSMC funded Apple ramp via debt and filled half their requested volume
“What we first did our financial planning and we decided not to cut dividend. We decided not to sell new stock. We decided to just borrow. And I mean, this was also with consultation with Goldman Sachs, you know, we chose following. How much? I looked at the nu…”
Chang: Apple's initial TSMC pitch proposed a 40% gross margin
“He did say that we will let you have a 40% gross margin, and I think, well, I didn't say anything. I didn't answer him. I didn't respond to that, but our margin at that time was already 45%, and I was trying to put it up to 50%.”
Zuckerberg Pitched Steve Jobs on Integrating Facebook's Platform Directly Into iOS
“The next year, in 2008, when the iPhone SDK was launching and people were building apps, Mark and Facebook actually go to Apple and meet with Steve, and they pitch Steve on exactly what you were just talking about, Ben. Like, hey, how about you let us bring ou…”
Rosenthal: Great companies retain homegrown or long-tenured senior executives
“This is almost always true, really is true in every great company that I can think of. The core senior most executive team are all people who came up in the company Or have been there for a very, very long time. It's not a whole bunch of mercenaries there at t…”
Matching iPhone Cash Flows Would Leave Reality Labs Net Negative Until 2035
“Well, I did that napkin math, and if twenty-twenty-four, This year was Apple's 2007, so you just take all the iPhone's cash flows and you start the clock right now. Meta's cumulative cash flows from Reality Labs would be net negative until at least 2035.”
Zuckerberg: Meta's shipping philosophy is the opposite of Apple's long-cycle polish
“I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple, and clearly their stuff has worked really well too, right? But I mean, they take this approach, it's like, we're gonna take a, like, a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out and maybe…”
Rosenthal: Microsoft's Real Mobile Competitor Was Android, Not Apple's iPhone
“Microsoft's competitor was not Apple and the iPhone, it was Android.”
Apple matched Microsoft's marketing spend for the launch of Excel
“And so I'm not sure this has ever been publicly disclosed before, but Apple spent just as much marketing Excel as Microsoft did. They matched Microsoft's marketing spend with their own campaign for it and split the bill.”
Apple's 1985 intellectual property license covered all future versions of Windows
“Apple does do a deal to license a lot of quote unquote their intellectual property, which of course came from Xerox, to Microsoft. Apple, I think, was under the impression that it was just for Windows one point oh, but the actual terms of the agreement are thi…”
Without Lockheed in Silicon Valley, Apple Would Not Exist
“No Lockheed, no Woz in Silicon Valley, no Apple.”
Lasky: thatgamecompany rejected an Apple Arcade deal over strict exclusivity demands
“Apple wanted us in the arcade. We couldn't do it because we want it to be cross-platform, right? And they wanted exclusives.”
Senra: There was no working with Steve Jobs, only working for him
“I think the difference is from, like, a founder's perspective, like, there is no working with Steve Jobs. It's working for.”
Qualcomm Is Developing a Direct Competitor to Apple's M-Series Chips
“They already make Snapdragons for the high-end Android phones, and soon they'll be able to make a competitor to Apple's M series chips for laptops and desktops and maybe even servers.”
Qualcomm Contractually Forced Apple to Vocally Condemn WiMAX Under Penalty
“Qualcomm asked Apple to speak out against WiMAX, which is a competing technology. They were like, we need you to vocally Speak out that our competitor is a bad piece of technology. They also stipulated that if Apple ever used a competing supplier and keep in m…”
Rosenthal: Growth runway duration matters far more than annual growth rate
“It's not your growth rate in any given year that matters.
Frankly, that doesn't matter at all.
what matters is how many years of growth do you have left?
Like that is the ultimate question.
And in the case of Amazon, in the case of Apple, if you have decades …”
Rosenthal: Sequoia selling Apple early is investing history's biggest mistake
“I think this is probably the single biggest mistake, period, in investing history.
I don't see, I don't think there's any way that it can't be, definitionally.”
NVIDIA and CUDA constitute a platform on par with Apple and Microsoft
“NVIDIA is a platform, in my mind, no doubt about it. CUDA and NVIDIA and general purpose computing on GPUs is a platform, so whatever, you know, all of the stew of powers that go into making that, that go into making Apple, Microsoft, you know, and the like, G…”
Apple Could Have Achieved Dominant PC Power Had the Apple III Succeeded
“I think if they hadn't completely flubbed the Mac three, I think they might've ended up in a very attractive power position because they did own the stack and they did own the operating system and they didn't yet own the processor, but they could eventually.”
Sony cannot build great software and services to differentiate its hardware
“They don't know how to build fantastic software and services that differentiate their hardware. They just make great hardware.”
Apple built history's greatest business while Sony became relatively undifferentiated
“Apple by shifting down to just a few product lines and focusing on the integration of hardware, software, and services, not to mention pseudo monopolistic distribution channels like the app store have just built
Like the greatest business in history and Sony …”
Eich tried to build a WebKit-based browser at Mozilla with Apple engineers
“And I actually talked at one point with Dave Hyatt about doing this. But I couldn't recruit them away from Apple, and I tried to get Hewitt as well, and it would have been a WebKit-based Mozilla browser, but it was too risky. I couldn't get the talent I needed…”
Eich: Apple Safari beat Firefox on privacy by blocking third-party cookies
“The very first Safari had private windows. It had a third party cookie blocker. Neither of these things were in Firefox at the time. Private windows came in quickly. We never shipped a third party cookie blocker in my time there.”
Bathgate: Halving Apple App Store take rate costs 5% of gross profit
“What's the gross profit impact if they cut their app store you know, take rate from 30% to 15%, you know, across The board. What is that like? Five percent of gross profits. It's like meaningless to them and it would create so much value for all the, and there…”
Gilbert: Apple extracts partner profits while preserving its developer ecosystem
“Where, like, Apple's keeping the take rate where it is, they're gonna take an insane amount of the profits of the work of these partners, but they want to keep the partners around. Like, Apple's not gonna, they're like, well, we don't want to go build every ap…”
The Brad Pitt Formula 1 Movie Grossed $630 Million Worldwide
“Which grossed six hundred and thirty million dollars worldwide at the box office.
The highest amount, not only for a racing film, for any sports movie ever, and
The highest grossing box office movie of Brad Pitt's entire career.”
US Antitrust Search Remedies Against Google Are Immaterial
“The judge first ruled that Google was a monopoly in internet search, and then did not come up with any material remedies. I mean, there are some, But I would call them immaterial. They did not need to spin off Chrome, and they did not need to stop sending tens…”