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 37 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
Evans: External customers will spend $100B–$150B on AI coding this year
“This year, people outside of those labs will spend, clearly will spend something in the order of hundred, hundred and fifty billion dollars to use AI coding. Just to use AI coding. And that's not AI people spending money from NVIDIA. That's real money. And tha…”
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.”
Evans: OpenAI will face half a dozen competitors
“I'm not sure, you know, there would be a big debate about whether OpenAI is worth anything right now, or what it's worth based on the fact that there's clearly going to be half a dozen competitors to it.”
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: Custom video effects and actor swaps will run on iPhone apps
“Now, what, now, I, well, what is the point in which I say, okay, I would actually like to see that, but I would like to see Don Rickles instead of Go Forever. That, that is not 20 people in a production studio and a whole pile of SFX. That is going to be an iP…”
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 …”
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: 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: 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: Fully autonomous, driverless cars will not arrive by 2022
“Full, full, full autonomy as in a car with no steering wheel that can drive from San Francisco to San Diego while you sleep in the back and there's no seats, there's just a sofa and no windows, you know, like that kind of autonomy is five, 10, 15, 20, I don't …”
Evans: All of Apple's App Store rules will be overturned within 18 months
“Now none of this will stand because all of Apple's rules are going to get overturned in the next 18 months”
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.”
Evans: 10% of Google's workforce will work in compliance by late 2025
“I think the only certainty is that when we come back in five years' time, 10% of people who work at Google will work in compliance.”
Catton-Brown: Formula One will not secure its initial asking price for rights
“F-One is definitely not going to get the initial price set that they want. ESPN is definitely not, sounds like they're not going to fight for it.”
Benedict Evans: Screen shortages will cap 2024 Vision Pro sales
“And so Apple will sell, pick a number, tens to low hundreds of thousands of them next year, but picking a number wildly out of thin air, apparently people in supply chain say they'll be very supply constrained on the screen.”
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: AI search answers will drain web traffic from lifestyle publishers
“But if I'm going to say, you know, write me an itinerary for hotels, restaurants, and architecture in Barcelona, I'm going to get, that's going to produce less click-through, and so that's going to be less traffic for Condé Nast Traveler, it's going to be less…”
Evans: Generative AI will create a massive flood of automated search spam
“You're going to have people generating content in response to what they think search traffic is automatically. So you will have automatically generated video with automatically generated voice targeting search queries at massive scale. There will be a new floo…”
Evans: Leading-edge chip fab capex will climb from $20B to $40B
“Which is why Intel had this, you know, this capital project to build new chip capability in the US, and it was twenty billion dollars. And that's just this generation. And there's going to be 40, it's going to be forty billion dollars next year. And the number…”
Evans: No large company will build its own data center anymore
“But clearly like no one is building their own data center. No big company is going to say, right, we're going to have our own data center now and Everyone, you know, the next generation is clearly the cloud.”
Catton-Brown: New US F1 rights deal will likely close at $100M–$110M
“So more likely that if this deal closes, it's going to close closer to a hundred, a 110 Million. I think my gut feeling is that A, it's probably going to close.”
Evans: Google, AWS, and Microsoft Cloud Capex Will Near $100B in 2023
“Google AWS, Microsoft probably spent, will probably spend a hundred billion dollars on cloud capex this year.”
Evans: Dating apps will integrate LLMs for flirty message generation
“The next thing will be dating apps, like why all the dating apps don't have an LLM for like, write me something quirky and slightly flirtatious based on this profile. Go. Clearly that's like the next use case.”
Benedict Evans: AI model training costs will drop as efficiency improves
“And those are all, those points on that plot, all of like historically have gone up and to the right, but now they're going to start going down because the models get more efficient and people work out better ways of training them when you optimize all the ind…”
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: Running image generation models locally on phones is months or years away
“You know, we're going, quickly going to go to a model in which you can run stable diffusion on the journey yourself on your computer or on your phone. That's like months or years away. It's not decades away. That's close.”
Evans: Generative AI will expand to video and precise creative workflows
“It's probably, I feel like there's a whole second wave of what you can do with this stuff. And it will get to video, and it will get much more specific and precise and controllable, and it will answer a lot of sort of make me 20 options of X and Y and Z that h…”
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: YouTube will soon be blocked in Russia
“I think YouTube is blocked, or if it isn't, it will be soon.”
Evans: US e-commerce penetration will probably stay flat for one to two years
“Now it's probably going to be flat for a year or two, and then it will kind of carry on back up on the same curve as it was before.”
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: 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: China will target predatory mobile game monetization mechanics
“China is already having a crackdown on games addiction. You know, it has to be only a matter of time before China comes for this stuff as well and says, hang on, why are these people, you know, purely on sort of social harm and populism, whatever, but like Chi…”
Evans: Substack will eventually build discovery tools to find newsletters
“But what Substack has done first is make the tool to do the newsletter. What they are clearly will do over time is make the tool for people to find them.”
Evans: Anker will reach $2B revenue this year, half Logitech's size
“They built, getting on for two billion dollars, will be two billion dollars this year entirely known as a marketplace, which I think is, and that incidentally makes of about half the size of Logitech just as a kind of, as a point of comparison in the accessori…”