Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks Apple “[hasn’t] really invented something big in a while” and that she has been building on her past success. “Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re sitting on it 20 years later,” he said this week.
Zuckerberg made the remarks during a nearly three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan, where, along with discussing Meta’s moderation policy changes and pushback against diversity and inclusion policies, they delved into Meta’s mind with Apple and its policies. her.
The conversation actually started with of Rogan problems with Apple. Rogan said he’s switching “from Apple to Android” in part because he doesn’t “like being tied to one company.” He’s also not a fan of Apple’s App Store policies. “The way they do that Apple store, where they charge people 30 percent,” he said. “That seems so crazy that they can get away with doing that.”
“I have some thoughts on that,” Zuckerberg said. While he credits the iPhone as “arguably one of the most important inventions of probably all time,” he argued that Apple has set rules that “feel arbitrary.”
Zuckerberg said Apple “has completely hindered anyone else’s ability to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way” as Apple’s own products, such as AirPods. If Apple allowed other people to use its protocol, “there would probably be a lot better competitors for AirPods out there,” Zuckerberg said.
Of course, there’s a business behind the Zuckerberg feud. Meta has had long-standing issues with Apple and the 30 percent cut it takes on some App Store transactions. Apple’s restrictions on iOS have made it harder for Meta to compete in hardware and wiped out billions of dollars in advertising. Zuckerberg said that if Apple’s “random rules” didn’t apply, Meta would make “double the profit or something” based on his “back of the envelope calculation.”
Apple is increasingly under pressure to open up. It has made changes in the European Union in response to new laws targeting its policies and is facing a lawsuit from the US Department of Justice for maintaining a monopoly on smartphones. But the company seems intent on keeping its ecosystem closed until it is forced to change.
Zuckerberg believes that Apple’s reliance on “just advancing their stuff” will ultimately hurt the company. Apple “has been so off their game in terms of not releasing a lot of innovative things,” he said. He said the tech industry is “super dynamic” and “if you just don’t do a good job for 10 years, eventually, you’re just going to get beat by somebody.” (It’s easy to guess who Zuckerberg thinks it might be!)
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Zuckerberg’s comments.
“There is no longer a physical world and a digital world.”
Zuckerberg touched on many other tech topics as part of his conversation with Rogan, including AI and how he thinks about screen time with his daughter playing Minecraft. One area he spent some time on was neural interfaces and how the physical and digital worlds will blend together.
He thinks “it’s going to be a while before we really deploy anything that goes into your brain,” for example, and (naturally) he talked about the benefits of a wrist-based neural interface, for which Meta is working on. as part of Orion augmented reality glasses.
Down the line, Zuckerberg envisions a world where you’ll be able to use a neural interface wristband and glasses to text a friend or an AI and the glasses will give you the answer. He also believes that as smart glasses or even contact lenses as a computing platform become more developed, the Internet will “overlap” the physical world.
“I think we’re basically going to be in this wild world where most of the world is going to be physical, but there’s going to be an increasing amount of virtual objects or people that are lighting up or holograms on things. different to interact in different ways,” he said.
“There is no longer a physical world and a digital world,” he added. “It’s 2025. It’s a world.”
