What matters in tech? Newsletter, essays and presentations by Benedict Evans.
Visit ben-evans.com → On Hacker News May 2013 – Sep 2026
Tech Industry & Business 33AI & Machine Learning 7Society, Policy & Culture 5Networking & Internet 1Life, Learning & Writing 1
Apple’s talk about services got specific with a bunch of news subscription services. Most of them are sensible and worthy iteration, but the company still hasn’t explained exactly what it plans with its push into commissioning billions of dollars of premium TV (Spielberg! Oprah!). Maybe all of this
I’ve been looking at this chart a lot over the past few weeks.
We all know, I think, that there are now far more smartphones than PCs, and we all know that there are far more people online now than there used to be, and we also, I think, mostly know that big tech companies today are much bigger than the big tech companies of the past. It’s useful, though, to pu
What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025.
Is Xiaomi just another handset maker, or something more? We may start seeing a lot less uniformity in how Android comes to market, and what it looks like. That matters to Google.
Looking forward 10 years, there are three primary technology that will change everything - cars, augmented reality and machine learning. But in the meantime, there ere huge changes around advertising, TV and retail that come from consumer behavior and industry dynamics, not tech, but will c
People in tech and media have been saying that ‘content is king’ for a long time - content and access to content was a strategic lever for technology. This isn’t really true anymore. Music and books don’t matter much to tech, and TV probably won’t matter much either.
The new iPhones were much the most predictable part of Apple's event - widely leaked and impelled by an irresistible logic - the customer is always right. For all that Apple thought and argued that you should optimize for the thumb size, it turns out optimizing for the pocket size is a better metr
20 years ago Apple seized music, and turned it into a lever for its broader business. It failed to do the same to TV, and lost control of music, but won massively in games, where it now makes more money than the entire global digital music industry. Now, perhaps, it’s looking at advertising.
Amazon is a bundle - it’s hundreds of separate businesses, all running on the same common internal platforms. The big, established ones are highly profitable, but Amazon chooses to reinvest those profits into new businesses, so that reported net income for the company overall looks low. This mask
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