Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Target CEO Mark Zuckerberg lashed out at a rival tech giant Apple for disreputable innovation efforts and “random rules” in a lengthy podcast interview on Friday.
“On the one hand, [the iPhone has] It was great, because now almost everyone in the world has a phone, and that’s what makes some pretty amazing things possible,” Zuckerberg said in the episode “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “But on the other hand… they used that platform to introduce a lot of rules that I think are arbitrary and [I] feel like they haven’t invented anything big in a while. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re just sitting on it 20 years later.”
Zuckerberg added that he thought iPhone sales have struggled as consumers need more time to upgrade their phones as the new models are not huge improvements over previous iterations.
“So how do they make more money as a company? Well, they do it by basically, like, squeezing people out, and, like you say, they have a 30% tax on developers by making you buy more peripherals and things that you include into it,” Zuckerberg said. “You know, they make things like Air Pods, which are cool, but they’ve just made it completely impossible for anyone else to make something that can connect to an iPhone in the same way.”
Apple defends itself against other companies by saying it doesn’t want to infringe on consumer privacy and security, according to Zuckerberg. But he said the problem would be solved if Apple fixed its protocol, such as building better security and using encryption.
“It’s insecure because you didn’t build any security into it. And then you’re using that as a justification for why only your product can connect in an easy way,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s earnings would double if Apple stopped applying its “random rules.”
He also shot at Apple’s Vision Pro headphoneswhich had disappointing sales in the US. Meta sells its own virtual headset called Meta Quest.
“I think Vision Pro is, I think, one of the bigger swings at making a new thing that they’ve tried in a while,” Zuckerberg said. “And I don’t want to give them too much time with that, because we do a lot of things where the first version isn’t that good, and you want to kind of judge the third version. But I think, V1, it definitely didn’t hit it out of the park.”
“I heard it’s very good for watching movies,” he added.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
