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 35 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
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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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: 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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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: 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: 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: 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.”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
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.”
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 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 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: 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.”
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…”