Why Mark Zuckerberg Is Verbally Attacking Apple
At a recent Meta Connect conference, Mark Zuckerberg took shots at Apple by coyly referencing the company's closed ecosystem, lack of business model transparency, and its profit margins in relation to its hardware as a means of highlighting Meta's purported advantages.
Mark Zuckerberg has never been hesitant when sharing his thoughts about Apple, especially after the company introduced App Tracking Transparency. During his Meta Connect conference this week, he took several shots at the iPhone maker without saying its name. He criticized everything from the secretive nature of its business model to the firm profiting primarily off hardware instead of ads.
The 82-minute presentation also saw him attack Apple’s closed ecosystem approach to app development, funneling all iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch apps through its App Store. “In every generation of computing, there have been open ecosystems and closed ecosystems,” Mark Zuckerberg said via CNET. The thinly veiled comment was a somewhat direct reference to the tech industry’s previous platform battles.
This included intense competition between PCs and Mac computers as well as Google’s Android software being compared to Apple’s iOS. Without mentioning the company by name, Mark Zuckerberg said the tight control Apple holds creates a lock-in that helps its profits. He went on to explain that the metaverse should not be like this. Interestingly, his criticism of the tech manufacturer isn’t new.
Mark Zuckerberg has openly criticized Apple dating back to the first iPad. And this new wave of negativity probably marks the beginning of the next big technology battle. Both companies are preparing to launch VR heads that can overlay augmented reality images on the real world, or bring people into immersive virtual reality worlds. If these headsets are eventually incorporated into everyday activities like watching movies, it could start a new wave of growth in tech.
Apple CEO Tim Cook believes his preferred reality technology will profoundly change our world in a similar way the internet has over the past few decades. “We are really going to look back and think about how we once lived without AR,” he told Dutch publication Bright via CNBC last month. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg has similar hopes for the metaverse.
“We believe in this vision so deeply that we renamed our whole company after it,” Mark Zuckerberg said during his Meta Connect event. “And we’re in a moment when a lot of the technologies that will power the metaverse are starting to take off,” he added. As part of the presentation, he also laid out his vision for the future, with games like Iron Man VR, a suite of business productivity apps from Microsoft.
It also included the new $1,500 headset called Quest Pro, whose headline feature includes sensors that can read your real-life facial expressions. Meanwhile, Apple has not released a VR headset nor confirmed one is in the works, CNBC reports. But analysts say the iPhone maker is preparing to release a device with the ability to pass through video from exterior cameras to interior high-definition screens in real-time.
This is essentially the same headline feature on Mark Zuckerberg’s Quest Pro. If Meta does end up with a significant market share in head-worn device, and they become popular in the mainstream, then the company will no longer be constrained by Apple’s closed ecosystem policies. The company is actively working on this device.
