Apple has lost the title of being the most valuable company in the world to NVIDIA, and it’s now being attacked by its tech own peers.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that Apple hasn’t invented anything impressive in years. “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,” Zuckerberg said on the Joe Rogan podcast.
“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,” Zuckerberg continued.
“Like having this 30 percent tax on developers,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the cut that Apple takes on all purchases made through the App store. “(And) by getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it. 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 hasn’t been a fan of Apple for a while. As far back as 2022, he had attacked Apple for its App Store policies — Apple wasn’t allowing Meta’s apps to collect user data the way Meta wanted, which prevented the company from effectively targeting users through ads on its platform. This hurt Meta’s bottom line, and Zuckerberg had then said that Apple’s policies were designed such that it cornered most of the value created by apps on the App Store. But Zuckerberg has now attacked Apple’s inventiveness as well, claiming that the company hasn’t made anything great in a while. And given how Apple has been knocked off its perch as the world’s most valuable company in recent times, this remark will likely sting.