Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has had a long-standing feud with Apple, once again criticized the company in a recent interview with Joe Rogan. The CEO said Apple hasn’t innovated in a while and criticized the ecosystem the iPhone maker has built.
Mark Zuckerberg is taking more shots at Apple.
In an interview on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” published Friday, Meta’s CEO continued his decade-long feud with the Cupertino company and shared some of the issues he’s had with Apple.
Zuckerberg said on the podcast that Apple has been slow to innovate since the iPhone. He added that the few ways the company has been able to make money since then is by charging fees to developers and creating an ecosystem that is difficult for other companies to penetrate.
The Facebook founder acknowledged that Apple made one of the world’s most popular smartphones, but said that Apple “hasn’t invented anything really great in a while” since the iPhone.
“It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now, 20 years later, it’s just sitting there,” he told Rogan.
Zuckerberg said that to make up for declining iPhone sales, Apple would impose what he called a “30% tax” on developers and create a closed ecosystem around Apple’s popular products. They are exploiting people.”
“They’re making things like Airpods, which is great, but it just completely hinders someone else’s ability to make something that connects to an iPhone in the same way,” he said.
Zuckerberg said he experienced this when Meta was developing the Ray-Ban Metaglasses.
The CEO said Apple refused to allow Meta to use the same “protocol” that Apple uses for Airpods, allowing MetaGlass to connect seamlessly to iPhones. Zuckerberg said he believes Apple is using privacy and security concerns as an excuse to continue building walls around its ecosystem.
Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta, echoed similar sentiments in an October interview with Stratechery.
“What I’m particularly worried about about Apple is that they’re so locked down on their phones and devices that they can do whatever they want with them,” he said. He cited Airpods as an example.
Spokespeople for Meta and Apple did not respond to requests for comment over the weekend.
Zuckerberg is undergoing a brand transformation in preparation for the second Trump administration, backtracking on content moderation and rolling back internal DEI efforts. But the feud with Apple dates back to at least 2014.
Zuckerberg has previously criticized Apple’s prices, app store, privacy policy, and most recently the company’s Vision Pro VR headset.
Still, Zuckerberg said on his podcast that he remains optimistic.
“So the good news about the technology industry is that it’s a very dynamic industry and things are being invented all the time,” he said. “And I think companies, if they don’t do a good job for about 10 years, eventually someone else will beat them down.”
