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 20 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
The Microsoft antitrust case did not create Google or the iPhone
“This is kind of bizarre assertions that somehow the DHA Microsoft case resulted in the rise of Google or resulted in the iPod and the iPhone, which is just ignorant nonsense.”
Brody: Generational demographics are marketing fiction except for the pre-iPhone divide
“Demography is made up nonsense that isn't true. And I think it's often done to sell consulting services and to make marketing seem like they're creating generations. The truth is, I don't really believe that with one exception, which I'll come back to, that th…”
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 App Store's purpose is selling iPhones, not standalone profit
“The purpose of the app store is to sell iPhones. I mean, it has revenue, and it has a cost base, but it also sells iPhones.”
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: 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: 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: More third-party software is installed today despite walled gardens
“There is vastly more third-party software from vastly more people being installed than ever before on this closed sealed box walled garden.”
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: Generative AI is moving faster than the web or smartphones did
“This is all happening so much more quickly than previous changes like the web or iPhones did.”
Evans: Winning VR/AR platforms will be open ecosystems like iPhone
“The ones that will win will be ones that are open platforms in the way that the iPhone was an open platform. And I do mean deliberately to say the iPhone is an open platform. It has millions of apps and billions of downloads. It's an open platform. That's what…”
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: Most component value in iPhones comes from outside China
“The iPhone is made in Shenzhen, but actually, the vast majority of the value inside it doesn't come from China.”
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.”
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'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'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: iOS attack surface dwarfs Mac with one billion active devices
“There's, say, a hundred million Macs out there, and most people don't really install software on their Macs. They've got the software it came with, they installed Zoom, and maybe Office, or maybe Photoshop, and that's kind of it... Nobody is installing five ap…”