Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, September 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hit a rival tech giant Apple for poor innovation efforts and “random rules” in a lengthy podcast interview on Friday.
“On the one hand, (the iPhone) was great because now almost everyone in the world has a phone and you can do really amazing things with it,” Zuckerberg said in an episode of the show “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “But on the other hand… they have used this platform to put in place a lot of rules that I think seem arbitrary and (I) feel like they haven't really come up with anything great in a while. It's like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now, 20 years later, they're just sitting on it.
Zuckerberg added that he thinks so iPhone sales were poor as consumers spend more time updating their phones as new models do not represent significant improvements over previous iterations.
“So how do they make more money as a company? Well, what they're doing is just squeezing people and, as you say, putting that 30% tax on developers, getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it,” Zuckerberg said. “You know, they build things like Air Pods, which are cool, but they just make it completely difficult for anyone else to be able to build something that can connect to an iPhone in the same way.”
According to Zuckerberg, Apple is defending itself against resistance from other companies, claiming that it does not want to violate consumers' privacy and security. But he said the problem would be resolved if Apple fixed its protocol, such as by creating better security and using encryption.
“It's insecure because there are no safeguards built into it. And now you use it as justification for why only your product can connect easily,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said that if Apple stops its “random rules”, Meta's profit will double.
He also shot at Apple Vision Pro headsetwhich had disappointing sales in the US. Meta sells its own virtual headsets called Meta Quest.
“I think Vision Pro is one of the bigger changes in doing a new thing that has been tried in a while,” Zuckerberg said. “And I don't want to bother them too much because we do a lot of things where the first version isn't very good and you kind of have to evaluate the third version. But I mean, V1, he definitely missed the mark.”
“I heard it's really good for watching movies,” he added.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.