Apple
includes Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Card, Apple Mail, Apple II, Apple Music, Apple Fitness+, Apple A Series, Apple Intelligence, Apple Pencil and 14 more
130 statements across 40 episodes · 34 bullish · 29 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Oct 11, 2020 by Benedict Evans · said 1,240 times in 80 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Benedict Evans (1071), Toni Cowan-Brown (143), Jeremy White (16), Jay Goldberg (8), Toni Campbell (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 21 mentions in 4 episodes 5 per episode
2025 73 mentions in 3 episodes 24 per episode
2024 166 mentions in 8 episodes 21 per episode
2023 173 mentions in 14 episodes 12 per episode
2022 285 mentions in 24 episodes 12 per episode
2021 369 mentions in 19 episodes 19 per episode
2020 153 mentions in 8 episodes 19 per episode
Everything said about Apple, oldest first
Oct 11, 2020 neutral
Evans: Lacking a US privacy regulator, Apple and Google write the rules
“The US doesn't have a privacy regulator. And so Facebook, Apple on one level, you know, Apple and Google are remaking the ad tech industries. And so they're doing privacy regulation. Apple is doing privacy regulation and what you can do on the phone. Facebook …”
Oct 19, 2020 bullish
Apple's custom silicon is likely 25% better than rival chips
“Apple now makes the, what's called the SAC, so the system on a chip, basically the CPU inside an iPhone and an iPad. While they design it themselves, it's manufactured for them by TSMC. That's probably 25% better than any other chip on the market.”
Oct 19, 2020 positive
Oct 19, 2020 positive
Oct 19, 2020 positive
Apple avoids public experimentation and only ships finished products
“What Apple does is they don't experiment in public. They have this theory of the product, and we think this product is now something that we think you will, there's a real theory as to why you would buy this and what it's useful for. And it all works, and ever…”
Oct 19, 2020 neutral
Oct 19, 2020 neutral
Two modern iPads contain more transistors than every 1984 Mac combined
“The SAC and the new iPad has I think 11.8 billion transistors. Which, what does that mean? Well, you're going to do the math. The original Mac in 1984 had 68 K, 68,000 transistors, and they sold 370,000 in the first year. So you can work that out, and it turns…”
Nov 2, 2020 neutral
Nov 16, 2020 negative
Evans: 1980s Apple Suffered From Trying to Build Everything In-House
“The other piece of this is that Apple in the eighties was very bad at leveraging the broader electronics industry and the broader supply chain. They did far too much themselves. They tried to make the thing themselves. They had too much proprietary technology …”
Nov 16, 2020 negative
Evans: 1980s Apple failed because CIOs controlled PC purchasing
“And the buyer for PCs in 1984 was a CIO who wanted 5000 of them at a price to go under people's desks, probably actually to collect to a mainframe or to run a single line of business application, and they didn't care where the power switch was, and how easy it…”
Nov 16, 2020 positive
Nov 16, 2020 positive
Evans: Apple's disruption strategy relies on aggressive technical abstraction
“Apple's approach to this, which is again, deeply disruptive, is to say, no, that's not how it should work. How it should work is, A normal person should be able to use it without having to know those things. And those things will be abstracted away, and you wi…”
Nov 16, 2020 bullish
Evans: There is no reason to buy any laptop but MacBook Air
“There's no reason not to buy any laptop other than the MacBook Air at this stage, and God only knows what performance we'll get in the full-size iMac and Mac Pro when they launch those over the next 18 months, because they won't have to worry about battery lif…”
Nov 16, 2020 neutral
Nov 16, 2020 positive
Evans: Apple only goes asset-heavy in retail and custom silicon
“And so they've always been very, they've always been actually been very asset light in almost all of this stuff. It's only, it's A, retail, and B, chips. Those are the places that they push deep into assets. Because that was where you could deliver something f…”
Nov 16, 2020 positive
Nov 16, 2020 positive
Nov 16, 2020 neutral
Feb 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Podcasts have no native distribution network for discovery
“A podcast, publishing a podcast of itself, there's no network. You will only get an audience if you have it from someone else on Twitter, on the web, or something. Or if Apple or Spotify choose to put you on the front page and choose everyone and pay everyone,…”
Mar 7, 2021 neutral
Evans: Spotify's fixed record label payouts leave no margin for Apple's fee
“This has become particularly an issue for Spotify because Spotify has this structure of their agreements with the record labels. So they're giving the record labels a fixed percentage of the consumer spend. So they can't give Apple 30% because they don't have …”
Mar 7, 2021 negative
Mar 7, 2021 positive
Mar 7, 2021 neutral
Mar 7, 2021 neutral
Evans: Apple's market share legally constrains its freedom to impose platform rules
“On any of these sorts of legal tests, Apple has sufficiently large market share that they are no longer completely free to do whatever they want. And you can think that that shouldn't be the case, but that is the case. You know, that's, that is where the law i…”
Mar 7, 2021 neutral
Evans: Apple's 15% fee tier covers 90% of developers, 10% of revenue
“A couple of months ago, they said, okay, if you're doing less than I think a million dollars a year, then it's only 15%. And of course that's a tiny portion of their revenue, but that's like 90% of the developers and 10% of their revenue.”
Mar 7, 2021 neutral
Mar 14, 2021 bearish
Evans: Apple's SKAdNetwork limits conversion attribution data compared to IDFA
“They're going to turn it off and replace it with something called SK Ad Network, which will really just tell you there was an install, but not tell you what or how much it resulted in, which is like massively less useful.”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Distinguishing on-device from server ad profiling is purely theological
“What exactly is the difference between Google knowing you're a woman with young children, and having that on a data center in Oregon, and Apple knowing, and your iPhone knowing that you're a woman with young children, and showing you an ad targeted at women wi…”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Jun 14, 2021 positive
Evans: Privacy branding is vital for Apple's future glasses and cars
“Having privacy, being the privacy company is a huge strategic asset for a large class of the kind of car products that they want to build, because those are products where privacy is actually much more material than it is even on the iPhone.”
Jun 14, 2021 positive
Jun 14, 2021 positive
Evans: Apple refuses to ship 'science projects' without immediate consumer utility
“And part of this is a sort of Apple philosophy is they don't ship science projects. They don't ship something and say, well, we don't really know what this is useful for, and maybe people will like it, and it doesn't quite, it's not quite finished yet, but her…”
Jun 14, 2021 negative
Evans: Eliminating ad targeting concentrates revenue into large platforms and paywalls
“So the aggregate of all of this is basically the strong get stronger, the big get bigger. The advertising moves to the big, strong, established sites. Small sites, new interim sites, less targeted sites makes less money. Content moves behind paywalls.”
Jun 14, 2021 negative
Jun 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Apple views user privacy violations as analogous to malware
“I think Apple sees privacy as sort of analogous to malware. It thinks that this is an architectural problem on the computer. It controls the computer. They make the operating system. It's their job to fix it in the same way that it was sort of Microsoft's job …”
Jun 14, 2021 bullish
Jun 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Apple's WWDC keynote has become primarily a consumer marketing event
“Now there's a two-hour keynote Which is online, and which is actually just a marketing event with a few small things in it that are relevant to developers, and the developer event, the actual developer stuff happens later.”
Jun 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Privacy is a strategic asset because Apple lacks an ad business
“Privacy is a strategic asset. You know, there's an old line in Silicon Valley that everyone is giving somebody else's business model away for free. Apple doesn't have, it doesn't have a social network, doesn't have a search engine, doesn't really have a, it do…”
Jun 29, 2021 neutral
Evans: Beyond superficial UI cues, Xiaomi does not copy Apple
“And you think, well, yes, up to a point, the calendar app looks the same as the Apple calendar app, but Xiaomi does not look like Apple at all.
And as soon as you push under the surface, it's like you can find reasons to support that, that, that presumption.
B…”
Jul 5, 2021
Aug 15, 2021 bearish
Evans: Tesla Risks Becoming a Subscale Legacy Automaker Like Saab
“You know, there is basically the bull argument on Tesla is it's a software company and the bear argument on, on Tesla is it's a car company. If it's a car company. Then it's basically a subscale car company and it's going to end up like sub. Great cars, but su…”
Aug 26, 2021 bearish
Aug 26, 2021
Sep 20, 2021 neutral
Sep 20, 2021 positive
Evans: Apple remains detached from short-term tech hype and panics
“It strikes me that Apple is like the two trillion dollar elephant in the corner of tech, because there are all these enthusiasms and arguments and panics and things that go on, whether it's, you know, content, whether it's, you know, content moderation, or adv…”
Sep 20, 2021 positive
Evans: Apple ships discrete modular building blocks before combining them into new products
“Part of Apple's roadmap is they create these building blocks, and they ship them as features year over the years, and then they combine them into something new. The obvious example is they added the fingerprint scanner the year before they did Apple Pay.”
Sep 20, 2021 negative
Sep 20, 2021 negative
Sep 20, 2021 neutral
Evans: Apple leapfrogs tech competitors annually before they catch up
“Apple leapfrogs the rest of the industry, and then in the next nine months, the rest of the industry will leapfrog Apple, and then in 12 months, Apple will leapfrog, shake another jump forward, and they've got to lock on the hand of the industry, and that's it…”
Sep 20, 2021 positive
Sep 20, 2021 positive
Sep 20, 2021 neutral
Evans: 0.5% of iPhone users generate half of App Store spending
“Second observation is we know from the disclosures in the Epic trial that about 80% so Apple did fifteen billion dollars. Apple gives a number. They did fifteen billion dollars in App Store commission. 65, sixty-five billion dollars, I think, of total money sp…”
Sep 20, 2021 negative
Evans: Epic Games' legal fight against Apple was driven by pure greed
“Epic wanted, A, not to pay the 30%, even though Epic has no marginal cost and was making loads of money, so that was pure greed on their part, and B, they wanted to run their own store so they could sell all sorts of different things, and so they could have al…”
Sep 20, 2021 bearish
Sep 20, 2021
Sep 20, 2021 negative
Nov 2, 2021 positive
Nov 2, 2021 negative
Evans: Apple's iOS privacy changes shifted ad revenue and hit Snap stock
“And we saw this really clearly, really clear for the first time this summer when Apple makes all these privacy changes in iOS and great chunks of revenue start shifting off other companies, A, either to
Off the platform altogether or be actually onto Apple and…”
Nov 2, 2021 neutral
Nov 8, 2021 neutral
Nov 8, 2021 bearish
Nov 8, 2021 neutral
Evans: The entire global recorded music industry is a tech rounding error
“The entire global recorded music industry is what, 16, seventeen billion dollars. Global online advertising is three hundred billion dollars. You know, Apple has, what, a hundred and fifty billion dollars of cash? Like, music is just a rounding error for the t…”
Nov 15, 2021 positive
Feb 21, 2022
Evans: Flagship retail stores are self-funded marketing, not logistical sales endpoints
“The stores are sort of a self-funded marketing operation. ... They broke even in their own right, but they're not just that, that's not actually what they're there for. They're not the end point to a logistic system.”
Feb 21, 2022 neutral
Mar 7, 2022 neutral
Apr 11, 2022 neutral
Evans: Apple offers credit cards for ecosystem reasons, not disrupting banking
“Apple is now, you know, has a credit card and the sort of talk that it's building a bunch of sort of financial infrastructure. It's not doing that because it wants to overturn the existing market structure of banking. It's doing that for Apple reasons.”
Apr 11, 2022
Evans: Big tech will not build narrow vertical SaaS because of scale limits
“When you're a company the size of Google or Apple or something there are things that are probably a perfectly good business, but they're just way too small as a proportion of that company for it to be worth, worth you donate it devoting the kind of effort that…”
Apr 11, 2022 negative
Apr 25, 2022 negative
Apple's privacy fetish means its Apple TV team lacks viewer data
“There's a story in the information this week, that Apple isn't collecting that, so that Apple's programming team have no idea what people are watching, because of the sort of fetish that Apple have for privacy, particularly Eddie Q, who apparently wouldn't let…”
May 30, 2022 neutral
Evans: Allowing Alternative App Store Payments Wouldn't Break iPhone
“If Apple let every app sign up alternative payment methods inside of their app on the iPhone. It would be annoying, and, you know, there would be some trade-offs around security and privacy, and you can also argue whether anyone would actually do it, which is …”
May 30, 2022 negative
Evans: Mandating USB-C for iPhone Is Dumb and Doesn't Help Environment
“If they have to replace the lightning port and the iPhone with USB-C. It's dumb. It doesn't actually help the environment. It's annoying. It's probably a less good port than the lightning port Apple uses. It's certainly a bit bigger. But like, guess what? Like…”
Jun 6, 2022 neutral
Evans: Apple's Privacy Positioning Is Driven by Its Product Roadmap
“Yes, I think they believe it, but they're also positioning themselves as a privacy company because they're selling car products where privacy is a big deal. The watch, the credit card, and of course, if you're wearing a pair of glasses that's got a pair, a clu…”
Jun 6, 2022 neutral
Evans: Apple CSAM backlash shows lack of coherent societal privacy consensus
“Is this is the privacy company that thinks they've gone through all this elaborate, complicated work to do it in a way that's private, and they get this huge backlash, which says to me, like, we don't have a coherent sense of what we mean by privacy, and so we…”
Jul 25, 2022 neutral
Evans: Apple's media services exist primarily to prevent Android churn
“It's a feel, feel good. And B, it makes it harder for you to churn away from Apple and move to Android. And so it's not the core skill, which is, would be like designing chips, but it's sort of adjacent to supporting the business.”
Jul 25, 2022
Jul 25, 2022 neutral
Evans: EU will force Apple to open NFC to third-party payment apps
“Certainly they will have to open up NFC, they will have to open up Apple Pay, so you'll have to be able to basically substitute Apple Pay with Stripe Pay or Square Pay. The EU, that's very clear in the DMA that's just kind of, that's going through its final pr…”
Jul 25, 2022 positive
Evans: It is no longer absurd for Apple to enter consumer banking
“It's no longer absurd to think that they might do, think about doing, of course they've thought about doing that, it's no longer absurd to think the, because it's a job, the idea is no longer absurd to think the answer might be yes.”
Aug 1, 2022 neutral
Aug 15, 2022 neutral
Sep 5, 2022 bearish
Evans: Apple and Google suffered a complete strategic failure in TV
“This is another piece of the story is Apple and Google sort of complete strategic failure in TV. What Apple and Google wanted to do and what Apple wanted to do with the Apple TV and indeed with the Apple TV app they have now. And remember the Apple TV original…”
Oct 31, 2022 positive
Benedict Evans: Meta's massive VR spend builds nonexistent hardware supply chains
“It's like, that's kind of why they're spending all this money, because they realize now actually there isn't all the stuff you need to get VR working actually isn't sort of already there waiting to be plugged together the way smartphones kind of work.
and s…”
Nov 29, 2022 positive
Dec 11, 2022 neutral
Dec 11, 2022 negative
Evans: DOJ e-books lawsuit effectively protected Amazon's monopoly
“The DOJ basically goes to court in order to protect the position of a monopolist. Now that was actually what happened. What they said they were, or thought they were doing, was protecting low consumer prices, which was also what was happening. But the low cons…”
Dec 11, 2022 positive
Evans: Blocking Apple's PA Semi deal would have preserved Intel-Qualcomm duopoly
“Apple is making basically better chips than Intel or Qualcomm today, and it's doing that based on the acquisition of PA Semi, which was now a decade ago, also ago, 15 years ago, and what would, if the FTC had blocked that, Then basically they'd have gifted the…”
Dec 19, 2022
Goldberg: Designing custom chips yields no direct cost savings versus buying
“And if you actually do the math and sort of figure out cost, cost of designing your own chip versus buying from someone else, it turns out that there is no cost savings directly. You only want to design a chip that conveys some form of strategic advantage, rig…”
Dec 19, 2022 positive
Dec 19, 2022 positive
Goldberg: TSMC's Arizona fab will lag leading-edge chips by half a generation
“And now I think that's actually gonna be a real plant in Arizona. And I think it's gonna have decent capacity enough to sort of satisfy the U.S. Military's needs and Apple's needs. And it will be, I don't think it'll be even a generation behind. I think it'll …”
Feb 12, 2023 bullish
Feb 12, 2023 neutral
Apr 16, 2023 neutral
Apr 16, 2023 bearish
Apr 16, 2023 neutral
Evans: Meta spends billions inventing tech, unlike Apple's original off-the-shelf iPhone
“Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on all of that Moore's law, because where Apple could basically sit on top of an awful lot of technology that already existed, like they didn't need to create ARM from scratch. They didn't need to invent …”
Jun 5, 2023 neutral
Jun 5, 2023 neutral
Jun 5, 2023 negative
Evans doubts Vision Pro passthrough will enable all-day wear
“The ad they show is like the kid can run up to you and talk to you and you can still see them and interact with you, which I have to say I'm kind of skeptical about. It seems to me that's okay, that's just enough for you to see why I should take my headset off…”
Jun 5, 2023 negative
Jun 5, 2023 neutral
Jun 5, 2023 bullish
Jun 5, 2023 positive
Evans: Vision Pro mirrors iPhone as an unspecific piece of glass
“There's kind of comparison with the iPad, the iPhone here, which is that I used to say the iPhone is just a piece of glass and it can become anything. It's part of getting rid of the buttons is it became totally unspecific. It's just a piece of glass that coul…”
Jun 5, 2023 neutral
Jun 5, 2023 neutral
Jun 5, 2023 positive
Jun 18, 2023
Benedict Evans: Augmented reality requires a strict visual realism threshold to work
“Whereas for AR, it either looks like it's there or it looks, or it doesn't. That's the thesis. And so it has to have that base level. And so Apple is basically saying that all the stuff that's on the market now just isn't worth selling.”
Jun 18, 2023 neutral
Benedict Evans: Vision Pro's absolute upside is iPad scale, not smartphone scale
“The best this is going to be, I think, is this is a pass to be the new iPad. It's a pass to be Hundreds of millions. That's the upside case for this, because you can't wear it everywhere. It's not something that five billion people are going to carry with them…”
Jun 18, 2023 neutral
Benedict Evans: Spatial computing turns the metaverse into a mere app icon
“With a feature phone, internet was one icon on your telephone. Whereas on a smartphone, the telephone is one icon on your computer. So kind of whole thing gets kind of pulled inside out. And that's sort of the AR VR thesis here that Apple has is no metaverse i…”
Jun 18, 2023 neutral
Jun 18, 2023 neutral
Jun 18, 2023 positive
Benedict Evans: Apple's laptop-grade silicon gives Vision Pro an architectural advantage
“Apple is using a high-end laptop SAC in this thing because they have their own, which has massively better performance per watt than anything from Intel. Guess what Meta has to use? They have to use a smartphone chip from Volcom.”
Jun 18, 2023 neutral
Benedict Evans: VR cannot become general computing without text-capable high-resolution screens
“You need the screen that Apple has shipped to do text at all. And you have, and you could propose that you can't do anything other than games, maybe fitness, maybe VR, maybe, maybe, maybe TV, maybe a couple of other niche things. Without text. And so VR is not…”
Jun 18, 2023 positive
Benedict Evans: Apple pulled 2030's dream AR and VR hardware into 2024
“What they've done is they've taken the dream device that everyone was sort of saying we need to have and that everyone sort of thought they would have in 2030. Maybe earlier, but basically, for the sake of argument. And they're going to sell it in 2024, so it'…”
Jun 18, 2023 neutral
Benedict Evans: Vision Pro mirrors the 1984 Mac's uncertain utility and price
“In that sense, it's actually, you could kind of compare it to the Macintosh, which launches in 1984 and was over 7000 dollars in today's money. And most people still didn't know why they needed it. And I think Apple only sold like half a million in the first y…”
Jul 21, 2023 negative
App Store privacy labels are a self-inflicted wound for Apple
“And so it's weird because the weird thing about this is this is actually hurting Apple. Clearly it's the problem with Meta and Twitter and anybody else with an app on the store, but it's also hurting Apple because Apple is telling people that there's no privac…”
Feb 8, 2024 neutral
Feb 8, 2024 neutral
Feb 8, 2024 bullish
Mar 13, 2024 neutral
Mar 13, 2024 neutral
Mar 13, 2024 negative
Evans: Generalized EU tech rules become complex when platforms implement them
“The EU is trying to say, look, let's just have like a kind of general, generalized rules that will sort of try and capture lots of different questions at once. The problem is, of course, as soon as you get into how does Apple actually implement this in the app…”
Mar 13, 2024 neutral
Mar 13, 2024 negative
Evans: Forcing Phones to Operate Like Windows Harms Users and Developers
“Apple actually doesn't want your phone to work like Windows, and that would be actually pretty bad for users and developers, and B, the EU has kind of come in with the sort of classic middle manager foolishness of saying, there's a trade-off here, and you have…”
Mar 13, 2024 neutral
Aug 19, 2024
Aug 19, 2024
Aug 19, 2024 negative
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Google pays Apple $20 billion annually to prevent vertical query routing
“And Apple is being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to do anything else here. So they're being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to say this is a hotel's query, maybe we'll send you straight to booking.com. They're being paid twenty billion dollars …”
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Apr 5, 2025 negative
Aug 21, 2025 bearish
Evans: Apple Acts as 'Dumb Money' in TV Streaming Strategy
“It's like all they're doing is being what in the value we used to call dumb money. You know, they go to LA with a big checkbook, and they write checks to people in LA, and people in LA give them a TV show. And they go, and Apple goes and runs it on their infra…”