Where will hardware growth come from?
As hardware specifications plateau, growth increasingly depends not on what devices can do, but on what users allow them to do. We call this advantage the trust premium: the compounding value a company builds as users grant it progressively deeper permission to access personal context, orchestrate across devices and services, and act autonomously on their behalf.
These three permissions form a trust ladder: each rung demands more trust and unlocks more value, from personalization to ecosystem lock-in to entirely new business models. Trust also compounds. Companies trusted at one rung earn the next faster than rivals. No hardware or AI company has yet earned full permission across all three, making the distribution of trust across this ladder the defining competitive map of the next hardware cycle.
The ladder has a downside: companies that monetize access faster than they earn it accumulate trust debt and, unlike a failed feature, lost trust is nearly unrecoverable. The winners will be those that climb at the speed of trust, not faster.
This e-book examines how the trust premium plays out across four critical device categories, PCs, smartphones, TVs, and connected life (connected home, wearables, and hearables), revealing where value is fragmenting, which partnerships will define the next cycle, and how the television market has already proven the playbook that others must now follow.
Throughout, you'll see how trust acts as the foundation enabling AI integration, ecosystem monetization, and hardware transitions. These are not separate strategies, but interdependent stages in a value chain where each build upon the permission users grant at the previous level.