Mark Zuckerberg visits Joe Rogan and blasts Apple
Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been under fire lately. He has been accused of kowtowing to President-elect Donald Trump and removing fact-checking from Facebook in favor of community-driven corrections (similar to what "X" does). Zuckerberg recently paid a visit to one of the most influential podcasts to make it clear what he doesn't like about Apple.
One complaint he made is about the lack of new impressive products from Cupertino. Zuck accused Apple of being complacent, sitting back for the last 20 years after inventing the iPhone. He says that it isn't clear whether Apple is selling more iPhone units year-over-year. The problem, according to Zuckerberg, is that each generation of iPhones doesn't bring many changes so people are waiting longer between upgrades.
"They haven’t really invented anything great in a while. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later. And they actually, I think year over year, I’m not even sure they’re selling more iPhones at this point. I think like the sales might actually be declining. Part of it is that each generation (of iPhones) doesn’t actually get that much better. So people are just taking longer to upgrade than they would before. So the number of sales, I think, has generally been flat to declining. So how are they making more money as a company? Well, they do it by basically, like, squeezing people."-Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, META
That's a pretty depressing look at Apple's iPhone business. Zuckerberg says that with iPhone sales flat or declining, they only way Apple can make money is by squeezing people. What he means by that is that Apple is taking a 30% cut of what developers are generating in the App Store. Additionally, The Meta CEO also has an issue with the way Apple creates peripherals that consumers buy for the iPhone. Zuck cited the AirPods, noting that are made in a way that prevents other companies from developing something that can connect to the iPhone in the very same way.
Zuckerberg has been sour on Apple for years. What really got Zuck's goat was Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature added in iOS 14.5. This feature allows iPhone users to decide whether they want to be tracked by third-party apps for the purpose of receiving targeted ads. Facebook at first estimated that App Tracking Transparency could cost them $10 billion in ad revenue during the first year.
All of this led to a pretty steep decline in the shares of what was then known as Facebook and at one point during 2022, the stock was down 61% for the year. It's no wonder that Mark carries a grudge against Apple although META shares are up over 300% off the bottom as the company's ad revenue has recovered. In 2021, Facebook/META ad revenue was $114.93 billion. It dropped the following year to $113.64 billion before rebounding to $131.95 billion in 2023. Full year 2024 data is not yet available.
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