At the risk of distilling a three-hour interview to a three-minute soundbite, Zuckerberg appeared on JRE and took aim at one of his compatriots in the Magnificent 7, Apple.
“On the one hand, [the iPhone has] been great, because now pretty much everyone in the world has a phone, and that’s kind of what enables pretty amazing things… But on the other hand ... they have used that platform to put in place a lot of rules that I think feel arbitrary and [I] feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while.”
Specifically, Zuckerberg took aim at AAPL for its policies that limit tech collaboration with its products.
Apple is notoriously controlling of what can and cannot connect seamlessly with, say, a MacBook or an iPhone. It’s been a big part of their growth strategy.
As a self-professed Apple fanboy, there’s a clear upside: if you have a lot of AAPL tech (I’m sitting here typing on my MacBook Air, Apple Watch on my wrist, listening to some Bach on my AirPods with my iPhone in my pocket), it all connects easily, and makes interfacing between devices a breeze.
But for companies like Meta, who have Apple users as a huge percentage of their subscriber base, these same rules and restrictions can be cumbersome.
And while it’s not clear what Zuckerberg hopes to achieve with his comments, whether a potential easing of Apple policies, or perhaps just a venting of frustrations about the state of tech, it’s fascinating to see these comments made on a platform that, ironically, largely has Apple to thank for its existence at all.
After all, podcasts, though not created by Apple, were first popularized and brought to national prominence on the platform, with the name itself being a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast.”
It’s proof that tech is a hopelessly interconnected jumble of codependencies. Meta will always need to exist on iPhone platforms, Apple will always need Google search engines and sales from Amazon, Amazon and Google will always need tech created by companies like NVDA.
But Zuckerberg might be attempting to use the “bully pulpit” of the biggest podcast in the world to give himself some elbow room, or at least, a better negotiating platform, with Apple in the future.
As of this morning, his comments don’t appear to have affected the stock price of either AAPL or META too much.
But it will be interesting to see if this was a one-off rant or the opening salvo of a policy shift at META going forward.
Whatever it is, we’ll probably hear about the next steps on some other podcast somewhere…
To your prosperity,
Stephen Ground
Editor-in-Chief, ProsperityPub
