Benedict’s Newsletter

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

This chart is very ‘glass half-empty or half-full?’, and it’s a puzzle. You could say that this is amazingly fast adoption, and much faster than PCs, the web or smartphones. 30% in two years! In a sense that’s a skewed comparison - ChatGPT is just a website, it gets wall-to-wall media coverage (this is part of Sam Altman’s job), and you don’t need to buy a thousand dollar device or wait for telcos to deploy broadband. Anyone can just go and use it today, so of course adoption is faster.

2 months 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.

Feb 18, 2025 | 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.