Benedict’s Newsletter

1 month ago | ben-evans.com | Benedict Evans

Now what? The problem with saying ‘Apple hasn’t done much lately’ was always that you said this and then a month later it might launch the Watch or the AirPods. You don’t know what’s in the labs! Except that these days, we kind of do. We knew Apple was working on a car for a long time because it was such a big project it was bound to leak, although Apple never said anything publicly. We know it’s working on xR because it launched the Vision Pro, but the Vision Pro wasn’t ready to launch.

2 months ago | ben-evans.com | Benedict Evans

We could keep going. The Kantar numbers fluctuate by up to 20 percentage points from month to month, which isn’t how hardware installed bases normally work and makes me uncertain as to what it’s really tracking. We could also go and check some of the other numbers, but if I have to check every number in a table then it hasn’t saved me any time - I might as well do it myself anyway.

Jan 22, 2025 | ben-evans.com | Benedict Evans

First, I try the answer cold, and I get an answer that’s specific, unsourced, and wrong. Then I try helping it with the primary source, and I get a different wrong answer with a list of sources, that are indeed the US Census, and the first link goes to the correct PDF… but the number is still wrong. Hmm. Let’s try giving it the actual PDF? Nope. Explaining exactly where in the PDF to look? Nope. Asking it to browse the web?

Aug 18, 2024 | ben-evans.com | Benedict Evans

Part of the purpose of Google’s payments is to make Google the default ‘general search engine’ but part of them is also to stop device-makers experimenting with ideas that unbundle - ‘bleed off’ - things out of general search. That will change now, though of course whether it results in anything is, again, unclear. Meanwhile, so far I’ve only been discussing Bing as the alternative, but for Apple, uniquely I think, there is also the option to create its own.

Jul 9, 2024 | ben-evans.com | Benedict Evans

Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.