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
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 …”
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…”
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.”
Evans: Book publishing holds zero strategic value for Big Tech
“Books is a much bigger industry, but it has no strategic value to Google or Apple or Facebook.”
Evans: Apple kept a VR headset in its lab for five years
“Meanwhile, Apple has had a VR headset in the lab for five years and looks at it every year and say, nah, we don't think this is good enough yet.”
Evans: Sideloading apps with file access would be a catastrophe for users
“I would die on the hill that you should not be able to install a random app
From the web that can access your file system. That would be a catastrophe for a billion users.”
Evans: Apple faces no conceptual barriers to building a better Tesla
“That's just money and time and engineering, but there's no conceptual reason why they couldn't make a better Tesla.”
Evans: Apple modularized product rollouts to prevent shipping delays
“What they've sort of done is modularized, modularized the way that they roll out the hardware and the software in such a way that they can get that
Predictable, repeatable thing happening every year without delaying.”
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…”
Evans: Apple Fitness+ caters to Cupertino insiders instead of fitness beginners
“So you're actually not designing it
For the people that you think you're designing it for.
You're designing it for your friends in Cupertino who like that music and go to the gym all the time.”
Evans: 0.5% of App Store Accounts Generated 54% of Billings in 2016
“Not .5% of accounts spent over 450 dollars in the quarter. Not sure if this is quarter or month, I have to go and check. Same point, really. And those users were 54% of total App Store billings.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Evans: Game streaming is the first major consumer product Apple has blocked
“Now we have this very specific set of things around streaming games, but now you actually have like a, for the first time, like a real big tangible product that people would like to buy that Apple's blocking”
Evans: Eliminating mobile app sandboxing and curated stores would be a catastrophe
“I actually have absolutely no interest in debating the idea that a sandbox and an app store in principle is a good idea and that getting rid of it would be a catastrophe.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Apple has likely kept VR headset prototypes in labs for years
“And you know, you can be completely certain that Apple has a VR headset in the lab. They've had a VR headset in the lab for five years, maybe 10 years, and they make it, because of course they do.”
Evans: US and EU Exhibit Radically Different Approaches to Tech Regulation
“And I thought there was just kind of an interesting symmetry there in these two sort of radically different approaches to regulation and to political control of technology companies.”
Benedict Evans: Cheaper Apple Vision models will drive volume sales by 2026
“And that will have sort of sales in volume in maybe twenty-twenty-five or twenty-twenty-six, and then there'll be the Vision Vision and the Vision SE and so on, and the price will slowly come down”
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'…”
Evans: Apple launched Vision Pro with 20 use cases, mimicking Watch playbook
“They've kind of done what they did with the watch. And what they did with the iPad, which is make a list of 20 possible things that might work, try all of them, and then later on we'll double down on what works.”
Evans: Apple will release a cheaper non-Pro 'Vision' headset
“This is called the Vision Pro, very clear signaling that there's going to be a Vision. So there's going to be cheaper, you know, the price will kind of cascade down.”
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…”
Evans: Fitness is the only non-gaming use case working for Oculus
“The one thing they didn't talk about is fitness, which is interesting because VR fitness is the one thing that's other than games sort of work for Oculus.”
Evans: Vision Pro delivers five-year-future AR/VR capabilities at $3,500
“This is sort of the dream VR AR device from five years time. But today, which is, or rather next year, which is sort of why it's five, three and a half grand and not 500 bucks.”
Evans: If Apple launches a $3,000 headset, it will sell negligible volume
“And if it is 3000 dollars, well, they're not going to shift any volume of that this year, so it will remain, like, very early.”
Evans: Semiconductor chips are strategically interesting to tech again beyond Apple
“You know, there's a longer conversation to have around chips, which I think have become strategically interesting to the rest of tech for the first time in a very long time like beyond, beyond just Apple.”
Evans: Specialized vertical software on iPads captured restaurants, not Big Tech
“That didn't get eaten by Google, or Amazon, or Apple. It's a generic iPad in a case, and then there's However many software companies, a bunch of software companies that go and solve, this is what restaurants need.”
Evans: Google pays roughly $15B for default search in Safari and Mozilla
“And so Google is paying something like fifteen billion dollars to be the default search engine in Mozilla and Safari and whatever else is out there, basically Mozilla and Safari.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Evans: Music is not a top five strategic priority for Big Tech
“Nobody at Apple is sitting there thinking about music anymore. I mean, well, very few people at Apple, they have a music business, but it's not like the top five strategic priorities at Apple nor Google, nor Facebook.”
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.”
Evans: More people download software on iPhone now than all pre-2005 platforms combined
“There are more people downloading software on an iPhone now than happened on every computing platform on earth before 2005.”
Evans: An Apple AR headset will take years to reach scale
“If Apple launches an AR headset at WWDC next summer, like that will not have hundreds of millions of users next year, the year after. Like it did take, it does take three to five years to go from the first thing.”
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…”
Evans: Apple will pitch AR glasses for immediate use, not 10-year concepts
“And you just know if, and when they launch AR glasses,
There will not be a concept video of what it might be in 10 years.
There will be some really, really clearly defined reasons why you should buy it now.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Evans: EU antitrust regulators will target Apple's APIs and App Store control
“This EU are going to come back and they're not going to start with payment. They're going to start with the store and the APIs and everything else.”
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…”