Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!!

‘Metaverse’ is the buzzword of the moment, yet it doesn’t really exist as more than a label on a whiteboard, and many of the ideas it tries to combine might not happen, or not like that. This might be the new ‘information highway.’ But however it works, some kind of break-out of new devices, new experiences and new kinds of popular culture seems pretty easy to believe in.

Read More
AR & VRBenedict Evans
A decade of the Tim Cook machine

In all the enthusiasms, arguments and panics around tech, Apple is the $2tn elephant in the corner, mostly silent and serenely indifferent to the news cycle. It just ships - and it ships market-leading products, with metronomic precision, at massive scale, on a decade-long strategic roadmap. It also likes lecturing its peers. But is there another Jesusphone?

Read More
AppleBenedict Evans
Ads, privacy and confusion

Privacy is coming to the internet and cookies are going away. This is long overdue - but we don’t know what happens next, we don’t have much consensus on what online privacy actually means, and most of what’s on the table conflicts fundamentally with competition.

Read More
Antitrust posturing

US politicians proposed five tech antitrust bills in June. They’re aggressive and ambitious, and contain some important concerns and ideas. Unfortunately, some of them are also pretty naive - case studies in not doing the work.

Read More
PolicyBenedict Evans