Peter Thiel, evidently, isn’t a fan of the iPhone Duo.
In fact, the billionaire PayPal cofounder and tech investor said he hasn’t been very impressed with much of anything that Apple has done since its eccentric founder, Steve Jobs, died of cancer in 2011.
“In my telling, it did nothing new after Jobs,” Thiel said of the iPhone maker in a September interview with author Walter Isaacson for the “Builder’s Podcast,” which was released on Thursday.
“It turned out, yeah, the mobile phone was this giant invention — there was not that much more to do,” he said. “Then it was just scaling and branding and building it out over 15 years or whatever.”
Indeed, Apple has faced criticism for failing to innovate beyond the mobile phone and tablet, especially in the age of AI, where its “Siri” product is not as advanced as rivals from ChatGPT or Anthropic.
Jobs unveiled the first iPhone back in 2007 at a conference in San Francisco. Nearly 20 years later, Apple released the 18th iteration this week, with one slight caveat: This one folds.
That said, MacBooks are the de facto laptops for many an AI-nerd and normie alike. iPhones are ubiquitous, and the sleek AirPods design took hold when they were released in 2016.
Though Thiel told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times in 2017 that Apple’s era was over, the company’s stock price has grown steadily since then.
Thiel didn’t pooh-pooh Apple entirely. He called it a “pure, well-run value stock,” but lamented what he described as the loss of vision after Jobs’ death.
“I would still say somehow Elon or Steve Jobs are way better for society than Tim Cook,” he said.
Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment sent on Saturday.
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