Mark Zuckerberg has spoken out against Apple ‘just kind of sitting’ on the iPhone 20 years on and what it means for developers.
The chief executive of Meta Platforms Inc. appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and it didn’t take long for him to reveal his true thoughts about the technology company. Zuckerberg praised it for ‘one of the most important inventions of all time’ in creating the iPhone but interrogated how the company still makes money.
On an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience released on January 10, the host admitted there’s ‘so much about Apple‘ he ‘doesn’t like’ and it didn’t take long for Zuckerberg to chime in, noting how the rise of the iPhone parallels fairly closely with his own journey starting Facebook, Steve Jobs coming out with the first iPhone in 2007 and Zuckerberg with his first social media platform in 2004.
In the clip, Zuckerberg reflects on the ‘dominant platform’ being ‘smartphones’ and, while this is ‘great’ to ‘build these tools that everyone can have in their pocket’ and ‘there’s like four billion people who use the different apps’ covered by Meta, he notes the company ‘didn’t play any role in basically building that, those phones, because it was kind of getting worked on when [he] was just trying to make the first website’.
He argues: “[Apple] have ‘used that platform [of the iPhone] to put in place a lot of rules that I think, feel arbitrary and feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while – Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later and they actually, I think year-over-year I’m not even sure they’re selling more iPhones at this point. I think the sales might actually be declining.
“I think part of it is each generation doesn’t actually get that much better so people are just taking longer to upgrade than they would before, the number of sales has generally been flat to declining. So how are they making more money as a company?
“Well, they do it by basically like squeezing people and, like you’re saying, having this 30 percent tax on developers by getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it.”
For example, AirPods, which Zuckerberg praises as ‘cool,’ but says Apple have ultimately ‘thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way’.
Zuckerberg continues: “Apple has a specific protocol that they’ve built into the iPhone that allows AirPods basically to connect to it and it’s much more seamless and they’ve enabled that but they’ve not let anyone else use the protocol.
“If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there. And whenever you push on this they get super touchy and they basically wrap their defence of it as, ‘Well, if we let other companies plug into our thing then that would violate people’s privacy and security’.
“It’s like no, just do a better job at designing the protocol.”
Zuckerberg reflects on the whole issue as ‘wild’, but notes he’s ‘pretty optimistic that, just because [Apple] have been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things that eventually […] [it’s] just going to get beat by someone’.
UNILAD has contacted Apple for comment.
