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
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.
