Status of the DOJ v. Apple case

• The DOJ and 16 states filed United States et al. v. Apple Inc. in the District of New Jersey on March 21, 2024, alleging Apple unlawfully maintains a smartphone monopoly.(en.wikipedia.org)
• Apple moved to dismiss on August 1, 2024; Judge Julien Neals denied that motion on June 30, 2025, allowing the case to proceed.(en.wikipedia.org)
• As of October 2025, the case remains active in pretrial/discovery with no settlement, dismissal, or major scaling‑back of the government’s claims, and no trial date yet set.(grokipedia.com)

(1) Administration change leading to the case changing or going away

• Chamath predicted “at least a 50% chance” the administration would turn over and that this would mean the lawsuit “changes or goes away entirely.”
• There was an administration change: Joe Biden remained president through PAFACA’s passage, but public reporting around TikTok’s PAFACA litigation refers to Donald Trump being inaugurated on January 20 (after the 2024 election), indicating a change in administration in January 2025.(en.wikipedia.org)
• Despite that change, the DOJ Apple suit has not been dropped or meaningfully gutted; instead, the new administration’s DOJ is continuing to litigate, with the motion to dismiss denied and the case moving into discovery.(en.wikipedia.org)
• So the mechanism he described (new administration → case goes away or is substantially altered) has not come true so far. However, the case could still be narrowed or settled later, so we cannot yet say the long‑run claim (“nothing’s going to happen here”) is definitively wrong.

(2) ~10‑year path to meaningful remedies/judgment

• The suit was filed in March 2024. Ten years from filing would put final outcomes in the early–mid 2030s.
• As of late 2025 (about 1.5 years in), there has been no trial or remedy phase; the case is still in early litigation.(grokipedia.com)
• Comparable big‑tech antitrust cases (e.g., United States v. Google LLC filed in 2020, liability decision in 2024, remedies proceedings in 2025) illustrate that multi‑year timelines are plausible, but they do not yet confirm a full 10‑year horizon.(en.wikipedia.org)
• Since we are far short of his 10‑year window, this part of the prediction cannot yet be tested.

(3) Smartphone no longer dominant by the time the case is resolved

• Chamath further predicted that by the time any remedies/judgment arrive (around a decade out), we will have “moved to a different compute platform,” making the case mostly irrelevant.
• That is explicitly about conditions in the early–mid 2030s. As of November 2025, smartphones clearly remain the dominant consumer compute platform, and we are years away from his forecast horizon; there is no way yet to assess whether they will be displaced by then.

Overall assessment

• We can say that one short‑term implied claim (that a change in administration would cause the DOJ Apple case to go away or be substantially changed) has not materialized so far.
• However, the core of the prediction—"nothing’s going to happen," taking ~10 years, and the case being practically irrelevant by then due to a platform shift—is framed on a decade‑long timeline, and we are only ~1.5 years into that period.

Because the main forecast concerns outcomes in the early–mid 2030s and those have not yet occurred, the prediction as a whole is too early to finally score, even though early evidence cuts against his specific scenario about the administration change.