Mark Zuckerberg slams Apple on its lack of innovation and ‘random rules’

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg slammed rival tech giant Apple for lackluster innovation efforts and “random rules” in a lengthy podcast interview on Friday.

“On the one hand, [the iPhone has] been great, because now just about everyone on this planet has a phone, and that is type of what enables pretty amazing things,” Zuckerberg said in an episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience.” “But then again … they’ve used that platform to place in place lots of rules that I feel feel arbitrary and [I] feel like they have not really invented anything great shortly. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re just type of sitting on it 20 years later.”

Zuckerberg added that he thought iPhone sales were struggling because consumers are taking longer to upgrade their phones because latest models aren’t big improvements from prior iterations.

“So how are they making extra money as an organization? Well, they do it by mainly, like, squeezing people, and, such as you’re saying, having this 30% tax on developers by getting you to purchase more peripherals and things that plug into it,” Zuckerberg said. “You already know, they construct stuff like Air Pods, that are cool, but they’ve just thoroughly hamstrung the flexibility for anyone else to construct something that may connect with the iPhone in the identical way.”

Apple defends itself from pushback from other corporations by saying that it doesn’t need to violate consumers’ privacy and security, in line with Zuckerberg. But he said that the issue could be solved if Apple fixed its protocol, like constructing higher security and using encryption.

“It’s insecure since you didn’t construct any security into it. After which now you are using that as a justification for why only your product can connect in a simple way,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that if Apple stopped applying its “random rules,” Meta’s profit would double.

He also took shots at Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which had disappointing U.S. sales. Meta sells its own virtual headsets called the Meta Quest.

“I feel the Vision Pro is, I feel, considered one of the larger swings at doing a latest thing that they tried shortly,” Zuckerberg said. “And I don’t need to present them too hard of a time on it, because we do lots of things where the primary version is not that good, and you should type of judge the third version of it. But I mean, the V1, it definitely didn’t hit it out of the park.”

“I heard it’s really good for watching movies,” he added.

Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from CNBC.