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 1,444 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 13 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
Goldberg: Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors trail Apple silicon by two years
“And so you look at the current Snapdragon applications processes that Qualcomm makes, it's, I don't know, it's two years behind where Apple's A series is or N series is.”
Goldberg: Cost per transistor is increasing in many cases
“The cost per transistor is actually going up in a lot of cases”
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 …”
Goldberg: TSMC's Arizona fab will remain dependent on Taiwan's expertise
“It doesn't mean the U.S. Actually can do advanced chips because that plant is going to be entirely dependent on expertise and knowledge base from the mothership in Taiwan.”
Goldberg: China has failed to copy TSMC by poaching personnel
“And China for years has been trying to poach people out of TSMC to come build their foundries. And it just hasn't worked. Like you, it's something about the whole body of knowledge that's just too, you just can't copy and paste.”
Goldberg: SMIC remains as far behind TSMC as a decade ago
“The most advanced Chinese foundry, SMIC, Shanghai Manufacturing, is still as far behind TSMC as it was 10 years ago, if not further behind.”
Goldberg: China has produced almost nothing in semiconductor manufacturing equipment
“Their attempts to replicate companies like ASML and LAM and build their own equipment for manufacturing semis has also produced almost nothing.”
Goldberg: RISC-V will probably capture automotive and IoT instead of mobile
“And I think that's going to have important implications, probably not for mobile or compute, But for all the other things that are getting chips built into them, cars, especially cars, home devices, internet of things, all of that is probably going to end up i…”
Evans: Fortnite seems to have mostly faded away
“Fortnite, although that seems to have disappeared now, or mostly faded away.”
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…”
Evans: MrBeast viewing time rivals a top 10 to 15 Netflix show
“Depending on whether you think he gets like one minute Per view, or six or seven minutes per view, it looks like Mr. Beast in total would sort of count as like a top 10 to top 15 Netflix show on a weekly, rolling weekly basis, and sometimes more than that.”
Evans: Amazon's ad business almost certainly creates more cash flow than AWS
“So it's got to have at least the same margins as Alphabet, which is like 60% operating margin if you exclude the R&D. And there's no CapEx. There's no incremental CapEx. So this thing is almost certainly producing significantly more cash flow than AWS.”
FTX Was a Wall Street Failure, Not a Software Failure
“The thing that strikes me, and it's a kind of a general thesis that someone told me the other day, I bore on about too much, but I bore on about it because I think it's fascinating, is that there's no software questions here. That this is like, you know, as fo…”
Messy SEC Regulation Pushed Crypto Trading Offshore
“The SEC's approach to regulating crypto has been a mess, and that's pushed stuff offshore. So that's pushed people who wanted to trade to go to things like Binance and FTX because they couldn't do it in the US.”
Celsius and Terra Luna Challenge Crypto More Than FTX's Theft
“In particular, in this case, you know, you could argue that Celsius or Terra Luna are actually much better, much bigger challenges to the concept of cryptocurrencies than this. This is just somebody who stole it. This doesn't invalidate the concept of a thing.…”
Web3 Does Not Exist and Cannot Support Instagram Today
“And in fact, web three doesn't exist yet. And it would not be possible to build Instagram on a blockchain today.”
Evans: Moving to 3D Computing Is a Bigger Shift Than Mobile
“But the other side of it is that most of what we were doing remained in three D, in two D. Text is two D. Pictures are two D. Video is two D. Most of what we do is two D. And so the shift in character to move to three D is actually much bigger than the shift. …”
Evans: Software productivity advances via automation and ML, not bigger screens
“I don't think the direction of travel of software is bigger screens. I don't think the direction, or more fundamentally, is not about showing you more information. It's not about having more rows in the spreadsheet. It's having less rows in the spreadsheet and…”
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: Zoom is a feature, not a $200B enterprise platform
“It's just a feature. It's not an enterprise software platform. It's not going to be like the next, you know, a hundred billion dollar, two hundred billion dollar company.”
Evans: Figma will grow to replace all of Photoshop and Illustrator
“This is clearly an existential question because this thing is going to grow. You know, it is going to grow, expand and take over all of Photoshop and all of Illustrator. It's going to be the better way of doing that in a way that Google docs never really did f…”
Evans: Founders wanting autonomy shouldn't take $20 billion acquisitions
“Yeah, you're going to reach a point where, like, if you didn't want to be part of Adobe, then you shouldn't have taken the fucking twenty billion dollars. Which was always the problem with WhatsApp. Like, and yes, there were all sorts of things about broken pr…”
Evans: Streaming platform scale is driven by content budget, not network effects
“The challenge is like, there's no network effect there. It's a budget effect. It's not like Facebook where everyone, it's not that, it's not like Facebook where everyone has to use WhatsApp because everyone's on WhatsApp.”
Evans: Australian court ruled Google is not a publisher in defamation suit
“There was a fascinating court case a couple of weeks ago in which some, someone, a newspaper would describe somebody as a gangster, and the newspaper story is in Google, and the person accused of being a gangster sued Google for defamation, and the court said,…”
Evans: Content matters more than software in media disruption
“In the end, it's still about the TV shows or the books or the music or the clothes. And I think that, that sense, it's a kind of a counter argument to the sort of software reach the world thesis.”
Evans: Software cannot reinvent real estate business fundamentals
“Is software a crowbar that lets you build an entirely new kind of real estate business? I really don't think so.”
Evans: WeWork failed to disclose core operational numbers in its IPO prospectus
“Which is, of course, what happened when we went out and IPO'd, and the real estate investors asked what the numbers were, and they didn't know what the numbers were. They weren't in the IPO perspectives because they just said it's a movement.”
Evans: As software commoditizes, value shifts to the domain product itself
“Sometimes what happens is that the software is just a commodity, and it's the other part of the product that's the thing. It's the clothes, or the TV, or the light, that's the thing. The product is no longer technology, the technology is just some part buried …”
Evans: Instagram is probably Meta's most valuable asset
“And yet you look back five and 10 years later, Instagram is probably the single most valuable part of Facebook. It's probably more valuable than the blue app or certainly more valuable than WhatsApp.”
Evans: Mozilla would go out of business without Google search payments
“And the second problem is, of course, that almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from this. And so if Google stops doing this, Mozilla goes out of business by default, and there's no competitive web browser, or the main competitive web browser, the main compet…”
Evans: The US will not pass an equivalent to the DMA
“The US isn't going to get an equivalent of the DMA.”
Evans: Pharmacy Benefit Managers exist purely to skim off the healthcare industry
“There's this weird thing Americans created called PBM. Is it PBM, the pharmaceutical, the kind of, there's this Entity that basically sits between the insurers and pharmaceutical companies and aggregates orders and bargains. And this is like a, you know, multi…”
Evans: Tech cannot unify consumer healthcare like it can consumer banking
“With banking, you can just come and be the bank. And from the consumer point of view, it's relatively straightforward as a consumer experience for that to be your whole banking experience. Whereas from healthcare, it can't be because there's all these differen…”
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: AI image generation requires human curation akin to photography
“It's like, you know, if I take a photograph, is the camera now the artist and not me? Well, no, it's me that decided what the picture was, and where to point it, and how to take it, and which of the 2000 pictures you took is, is the one. And, you know, I was t…”
Evans: Text-to-video AI generating specific human actions is roughly five years away
“Well, today, certainly make me a picture that says people doing this, and certainly, and then it will be make me a video that says, that shows people doing this, and that's, You know, that's sort of five years away or something.”
Evans: Secure encryption cannot exist with law enforcement backdoors
“There is no theory of what that would be, like, a secure encryption means no one can read it, but the police can read it, ok so it's not secure.”
Evans: Machine learning cannot reliably scan messages for grooming
“Problem two is that's not a simple database look at. That's a quite challenging machine learning problem, and it's not going to work very reliably. Like, it might work 60, 70% of the time, maybe. Massive false positive problem. Actually, we don't really have t…”
Evans: There will probably be a US political panic over Shein
“There hasn't been a Xi in panic yet, actually, even though it's another Chinese thing that every American teenager is using. But there probably will be. I don't know what form that will take.”
Evans: Shein's $3 prices stem from scale and manufacturing, not slave labor
“And it's not that everyone's slaves. It's just that it's, you know, it's made at massive scale in a different manufacturing model. And it's, you know, it's a certain level of quality.”
Evans: Metaverse standardization efforts resemble cable TV, not the internet
“The more that you try and make things open and standardised, And interoperable and portable, the more you're actually describing cable TV, not the internet. Because the whole fucking point of the internet is actually how little of it is standardized, as much a…”
Evans: Data portability mandates inherently conflict with user privacy regulations
“As a conflict between interoperability and privacy, because if you say, you know, you can say, make it easy to explain. You know, the competition regulator says, make it easy to export data, and the privacy regulator says, make it hard to export data, because …”
Google's next decade is moving all television advertising onto the internet
“The next 10 years of Google is turning everything, all TV advertising, into the internet. So they've taken everything else, but, you know, TV is a bit that hasn't really moved yet.”
Russia cannot manufacture new tanks due to foreign semiconductor shortages
“So the Russians are fucked, because they can't even make new tanks, because they can't get the components.”
Netflix is a TV company using tech as a crowbar
“Netflix is not a tech company. It's a TV company that's using tech, this new technology channel as an entry market and a crowbar to break into the market.”
Evans: Streaming lacks winner-take-all dynamics, protecting Disney and HBO
“This is like, there's not a winner takes all dynamic here. They're just one of many TV companies. And getting bigger and having more money does not mean that they can blow Netflix, that they can blow Disney and HBO out of the water.”
Evans: Tech failed to turn TV into a single Spotify-like library
“What the tech industry always wanted to do was to turn TV into YouTube or Spotify. That is to say, or what YouTube or Spotify then became, which is you've got this single universal library of everything, and you pay one fee, that's a reasonable amount of money…”