Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the Joe Rogan Experience podcast today for a wide-ranging interview on content moderation, the Trump administration, and Apple’s apparent lack of innovation.
Mark Zuckerberg joins Joe Rogan
Zuckerberg has long been an outspoken critic of App Store policies and Apple’s privacy protections. In this interview with Rogan, the Meta CEO claimed that the 15-30% fees Apple charges for the App Store are a way for the company to mask slowing iPhone sales. According to Zuckerberg, Apple hasn’t “really invented anything great in a while” and is just “sitting” on the iPhone:
“[Apple has] used the [iPhone] to put in place a lot of rules that I think it feel arbitrary. I feel like 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.
Acutally, 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 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 and having this 30 percent tax on developers.”
Zuckerberg also took issue with AirPods and the fact that Apple wouldn’t give Meta the same access to the iPhone for its Meta Ray-Ban glasses:
“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.
There were a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to build like a very good earbud, but Apple has a specific protocol that they’ve built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it.
It’s just much more seamless because they’ve enabled that, but they don’t let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there.
And whenever you push on this, they get super touchy and they basically wrap their defense of it in, well, if we let other companies plug into our thing, then that would violate people’s privacy and security. It’s like, no, just do a better job designing the protocol.
We basically asked them for the Ray-Ban meta glasses that we built, ‘can we basically use the protocol that you use for AirPods and some of these other things to just make it so we can as easily connect? So it’s not like a pain in the ass for people who wanna use this?’
And I think one of the protocols they’ve used that they built, they basically didn’t encrypt it. So it’s like plain text. And they’re like, well, we can’t have you plug into it because it would be insecure.
It’s like, it’s insecure because you didn’t build any security into it. And then now you’re using that as a justification for why only your product can connect in an easy way.”
Zuckerberg, however, said he’s “optimistic” that Apple will “get beat by someone” sooner rather than later because “they’ve been off their game in terms of not releasing innovative things.”
He went on to express his concern that one day, Apple will release its take on the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses with the key advantage of better integration with the iPhone. Bloomberg has reported that Apple is working on its own pair of smart glasses.
The conversation then pivoted to iMessage and Apple’s use of blue bubbles as a way to “embarrass” kids:
The whole thing that they’ve done with iMessage, they do this whole blue bubble, green bubble thing. For kids, it’s just sort of like, they embarrass you, right?
They’re like, if you don’t have a blue bubble, you’re not cool, and you’re like the out crowd, and then they always wrap it in like security.
Rogan and Zuckerberg then detoured into a segment where they awkwardly Google’d to determine if RCS was encrypted for iPhone users. Apple, of course, added support for RCS as part of iOS 18 last year.
The answer: it’s not. RCS Universal Profile, the standard currently published by the GSM Association, does not support encryption. Apple has said it is working with GMSA to improve the security and encryption of RCS messages rather than build its own proprietary flavor of end-to-end encryption for RCS.
And finally, Vision Pro:
“They shipped something for $3,500 that I think is worse than the thing that we shipped for $300 or $400. So, that clearly was not gonna work very well.
They’re a good technology company. I think their second and third version will probably be better than their first version. I think the Vision Pro is I think one of the bigger swings at doing a new thing that they tried in a while.”
9to5Mac’s Take
Zuckerberg has been busy implementing new dehumanizing content guidelines on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads this week. I’m surprised he could find time in his schedule to sit down with Rogan for this 3-hour interview.
Let us also not forget that Meta has never “invented anything great.” Oculus was an acquisition, WhatsApp was an acquisition, Instagram was an acquisition, and intermixed with those acquisitions are features copied and pasted from other platforms.
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