Benedict Evans sees a world in which Apple continues to thrive even as Android grows, the carmakers come under pressure and literally everyone in the world has a smartphone.
Benedict Evans on How Both Apple and Google Are Winning the Smartphone Wars (Video)
The prolific blogger and Andreessen Horowitz partner says that there will ultimately be 750 million iPhones and 3.5 billion Android phones on earth.
Tyler Pina for Re/code
It’s a world he tweets about daily and writes about often, alongside his work as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
And, we are thrilled to give him a stage — our stage — as Evans kicks off this year’s Code/Mobile conference in October, sharing his vision on where things are headed in this mobile-first world.
Evans gave a preview of his talk last week, saying he expects that there will ultimately be about 750 million iPhones and 3.5 billion Android devices on earth, enough to make both Apple and Google quite successful.
Though Apple accounts for fewer than one in five phones in Evans’s future world, he notes that Apple will still have 40 percent of the users in the United States and three-quarters of the value, along with the top 200 million users in China and a third of those in Northern Europe.
Given that, Evans said, he strongly disagrees with those comparing this to what happened to Apple in the computer business.
“I think it’s pretty obvious the Windows-versus-Mac metaphor falls short,” Evans said.
As for other changes, Evans said some of the most profound ones will come from how ubiquitous smartphones change existing industries. Uber and Airbnb aren’t really technology companies, but emblematic of a wave of companies that are emerging to seize on a societal shift, in much the way McDonald’s got its start thanks to changes in trucking and refrigeration.
Evans has plenty more to say, but we’re saving the best stuff for the event, which takes place October 7-8 in Half Moon Bay, Calif. (You can still sign up here.)
But since it is Evans’s first time at a Re/code event, we decided to let him try the red chair on for size. In a video interview with Code/Mobile producer Ina Fried, Evans talked about the market for wearables, the changes to cars that will reshape cities and even tried to explain that most enigmatic of subjects, Benedict Evans himself.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
