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 130 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
The DOJ gerrymandered its market definition in the Apple antitrust lawsuit
“The DOJ is suing Apple for having what the DOJ, claiming the DOJ describes as a monopoly of, quote, performance smartphones, which Apple described as gerrymandering, and I'm kind of inclined to agree”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Apple is more likely to replace ChatGPT than build a search engine
“It's much more likely, I think, that Apple will shift questions from ChatGPT to its own foundation model than it would shift questions from Google to its own general search engine, I think.”
Apple will maintain Google defaults while routing specialized queries to AI
“Apple will carry on treating Google as the default general search engine. They'll just peel more stuff out into their own foundation model or into chat TPT or into booking.com.”
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 …”
The US court cannot compel Apple to add Safari choice screens
“The court can't make Apple put a choice screen in Safari. Like, Apple isn't in court. Like, they haven't been convicted of anything.”
Devins: Bull case for Apple Vision headsets is 200 million users
“The thesis I'm groping towards is this is something that a couple of hundred, the bull case is a couple of hundred million people will have one of these eventually.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Evans: Apple will sell 200,000 Vision Pro units in 2024
“I'm not the right analyst to ask, but you know, they're not going to sell fifty million of them next year. They might, you know, they might sell a couple, they're going to sell a couple of 100,000.”
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 …”
Evans: Most Big Tech sub-threshold acquisitions were under $10M and 10 employees
“And the vast majority of them were less than 10 people, and less than ten million dollars.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Evans: The 30% App Store commission rule is toast
“Look, the 30% rule is toast, but we don't really know quite how and what and where”
Evans: All of Apple's App Store rules will be overturned within 18 months
“Now none of this will stand because all of Apple's rules are going to get overturned in the next 18 months”
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.”
Evans: Apple has always been a really bad partner
“The other kind of long-term characteristic of Apple is that Apple has always been a really bad partner.”
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 …”
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…”
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.”
Evans predicts antitrust concerns will force Apple to open iOS NFC access
“Well, I think it's pretty likely that Apple will have to open up NFC access, for example. Because that's a payment monopoly thing.”
Evans: Apple marketed Apple Intelligence heavily but missed launching key feature
“Apple has obviously put Apple intelligence on billboards everywhere, and had this coherent set of individual specific features, and then, of course, failed to launch the most important one.”
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…”
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…”
Devins: Meta has the right price; Apple has the right device
“And what I wrote last summer was that Meta basically has the right price and is working towards the right device. And Apple has almost the right device and is working back towards the right price.”
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…”
Benedict Evans: Screen shortages will cap 2024 Vision Pro sales
“And so Apple will sell, pick a number, tens to low hundreds of thousands of them next year, but picking a number wildly out of thin air, apparently people in supply chain say they'll be very supply constrained on the screen.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
Evans: The metaverse is dead and was always a meaningless term
“Obviously metaverse is dead which is good because it's a meaningless term and no one knows what anybody else might.”
Evans: The iPhone 15 will feature a 3D video camera
“I think it's now blinding the obvious that the iPhone 15 will have a three D video camera so that you can create content that will flow into this.”
Evans: Apple appears set to launch pass-through VR, not AR glasses
“It doesn't sound like it. It sounds like they're planning to do that with a VR headset.”
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 …”
Evans: The tech industry will aggressively push AI compute to local devices
“So there will be this massive push to kind of shift as much compute as you can down onto the device.”
Evans: Google pays Apple nearly $20B for default iPhone search
“Google pays, Apple pays, Apple probably close to twenty billion dollars to be the default search engine on the iPhone.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”