During an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Mark Zuckerberg stated that Apple is making money in a “controversial” way, while criticizing the company and claiming that sales are declining.
The Joe Rogan Experience, released last Friday (10), the owner of Meta praised Apple for creating the iPhone, calling it “one of the most important inventions of all time,” but explained that he believes the company hasn’t done anything significant since then.
“They really haven’t invented anything good in a while. Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re kind of sitting on it 20 years later, and really, I think year after year, I’m not even sure if they’re selling more iPhones at this point. I think sales may actually be declining,” said the creator of Facebook.
“I think part of it is that each generation doesn’t get much better, so people are taking longer to upgrade than they did before, and sales numbers have generally been flat or declining. So, how are they making more money as a company?” he asked.
“Well, they do it basically by squeezing people, and, as you’re saying, taking that 30 percent tax on developers, making you buy more peripherals and things that connect to them.”
He mentioned AirPods as examples of peripherals the company has created to make iPhone users dependent on their products. Although he admitted they’re “cool,” Zuckerberg argued that Apple made them in a way that prevents other companies from creating devices to compete with them.
“Apple has a specific protocol they built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it, and it’s much more seamless, and they enabled that, but didn’t let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there,” he said.
“And every time you press on that, they get super defensive and basically go into their defense like: ‘Well, if we let other companies connect to our business, it would violate people’s privacy and security.’ It’s like… no, just do a better job with the protocol design.”
Photo and video: Instagram @zuck. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.
