Mark Zuckerberg is taking more shots at Apple.
In an interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that was published Friday, the Meta CEO shared several issues he has with Apple, continuing his decadelong feud with the Cupertino company.
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 profit since then is by imposing developers’ fees and creating an ecosystem that’s difficult for other companies to penetrate.
The Facebook creator credited Apple for making one of the most popular smartphones in the world, but he said Apple hasn’t “really invented anything great in a while” since the iPhone.
“It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later,” he told Rogan.
To make up for declining sales in iPhones, Zuckerberg said Apple has been “squeezing people” by imposing what he called a “30% tax” on developers and creating an enclosed ecosystem around Apple’s popular products.
“They build stuff like Airpods, which are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the ability for anyone else to build something that can connect to the iPhone in the same way,” he said.
Zuckerberg said Meta experienced this when it was developing the Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
The CEO said Apple declined to let Meta use the same “protocol” Apple uses for Airpods in order to allow the Meta glasses to connect seamlessly to iPhones. Zuckerberg said he believed Apple was using privacy and security concerns as an excuse to keep a wall around the Apple ecosystem.
Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth echoed a similar sentiment in an October interview with “Stratechery.”
“The thing I worry about with Apple specifically is that they have their phones and devices so locked down that they can self-preference a ton,” he said, pointing to Airpods as one example.
Spokespeople for Meta and Apple did not respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend.
Zuckerberg has been undergoing his own brand transformation as he preps for a second Trump administration, walking back on content moderation and rolling back DEI initiatives at his company. But his feud with Apple goes back to at least 2014.
Previously, Zuckerberg has criticized Apple’s prices, its app store and privacy policies, and, more recently, the company’s Vision Pro VR headsets.
Still, Zuckerberg said on the podcast that he remains optimistic.
“I mean, the good news about the tech industry is that it’s just super dynamic and things are constantly getting invented,” he said. “And I think companies — if you just don’t do a good job for like 10 years, eventually you’re just going to get beat by someone.”
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