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: 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.”
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 …”
Evans: Apple rules force Google Chrome on iOS to use WebKit engine
“Chrome on iOS has to use Apple's rendering engine. It can't use their own rendering engine.”
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.”
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,…”
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 …”
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…”
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…”
Evans: 1985 Steve Jobs Would Have Wanted to Manufacture Chips In-House
“Steve Jobs, 1985, Steve Jobs would have wanted to manufacture the semiconductors himself.”
Evans: Apple captures over 75% of global smartphone industry profit
“Apple sells from memory sort of 10 or 15% of all the mobile phones on Earth. They sell, however, they have probably over 50% of the revenue and probably three quarters or more of the profit. They have 25% of the install base.”
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.”
Apple uses iPhone AR features as building blocks for future smart glasses
“But you, but for glasses, clearly what they're doing is they're building that building block in the glass, in the phone, so that it's ready when they have the glasses.”
No company besides Apple has sold 250 million $600 machined steel devices
“Nobody has ever sold two hundred and fifty million things at 600 dollars each, machined out of stainless steel before.”
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…”
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 …”
Evans: The EU Issued Apple a €2 Billion Fine Over Spotify
“Apple has just got its first first find from the EU. Two billion euros over Spotify, and also there's a bunch of to-ing and fro-ing over exactly how it implements the DMA and rules for third-party apps and Epic and web apps and so on.”
Evans: Apple Reversed Its Decision to Drop Web Apps in the EU
“Last week Apple said, well, we're not going to have web apps in the EU anymore. And then they said, oh, we changed our mind. We'll do it differently.”
Evans: Apple Briefly Banned and Reinstated Epic Games' Developer Account
“Apple kicked Epic off the app store for about two days and then changed their mind.”
Evans: Original Mac and Apple II cost $6,000–$8,000 in today's money
“The original Mac that was like seven or eight grand in today's money. The original Mac, the Apple II was like six or seven grand in today's money adjusted for inflation.”
Evans: Apple's 2021 R&D budget equaled its total revenue at iPhone launch
“When Apple launched the iPhone, I think the revenue was about twenty billion dollars. And last year, Apple's R&D budget was twenty billion dollars. It was a four hundred billion dollar company last year”
Evans: Apple relies on China for 25% of revenue and most manufacturing
“Apple, Apple, interestingly, is on the other side of this, in that Apple, of course, has 20, 25% of its revenue in China. And of course, the vast majority of its manufacturing is in China.”
Evans: Apple retail stores historically accounted for only 10-15% of revenue
“They don't disclose it now, but until sort of five years ago or so something, they broke out the financials for the stores and it was only sort of 10 or 15% of revenue.”
Evans: Apple launch events are the Met Gala of Silicon Valley
“It was, it's basically the Met the Met Gala of Silicon Valley.”
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.”
Evans: Apple's newly announced iPhones are notably uninteresting
“So we thought it would be kind of interesting to wrap up the new iPhones and so on, very, very briefly, because it's actually interesting how uninteresting they are.”
Evans: Apple App Store fees nearly match the entire recorded music industry
“Recorded music is a 17, eighteen billion dollar industry. Apple did fifteen billion dollars in in-app payment commission last year.”
Evans: Major Apple announcements synthesize minor features introduced across prior years
“Because generally when Apple announces something big, it combines four or five or six things that they'd announced over the previous couple of years that didn't look very important.”
Evans: Apple blocks and Google will soon eliminate third-party browser cookies
“Apple has been blocking third-party cookies entirely in Safari by default, and now Google has said from next year they're going to do that as well.”
Evans: One billion people currently own an iPhone
“And the result is that today a billion people have an iPhone.”
Evans: Approximately 100 million people own an Apple Watch
“People look and say, well, they haven't really announced anything new since the watch, and the watch wasn't a big deal, except a hundred million people have the watch.”
Evans: Apple has sold half a billion iPads
“So there is the iPhone and then they have the iPad, which leverages it, and they've sold half a billion of those.”
Evans: Apple spent roughly $100 million building its campus theater
“They must have spent a hundred million dollars on that theatre just for that event.”
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…”