Apple uses its platform to limit competition, Zuckerberg argues

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:20:20

   So one of the things that I want to talk about was I've been doing this thing, this transition from Apple to Android. and the difficulty of doing it, how locked you are in their ecosystem. Partly it's because Apple does a really good job of incorporating everything and making it very easy, your photos, your calendar, your this, your that, your iMessage. But I don't like being attached to one company like that.

2. 2:20:44

   It drives me crazy. And when I'm trying to get off, it's funny how many people use it. I mean, they've done an insane job because, like, I think there's some enormous percentage of kids today that only use iPhones. you know and when you try to switch over to android it's so much easier to switch from android to apple because so many people have apple when you switch from apple to android you kind of have to like redo your whole system it's such a pain in the ass but there's so much of what apple does that i don't like and one of the big ones is the way they do that apple store where they charge people 30 but that seems so insane that they can get away with doing that And I know...

3. 2:21:25

   I have some opinions about this. I know you do. That's why I brought it up. I mean, look, the iPhone is obviously one of the most important inventions probably of all time. You know, Steve Jobs came out with it in 2007. I started Facebook in 2004. So he was working on the iPhone while I was getting started with Facebook. So I basically, you know, one of my, one of the things that's been interesting in my 20 years of running the company is that I basically like the dominant platform out there is smartphones.

4. 2:22:03

   On the one hand, it's been great for us because we are able to build these tools that everyone can have in their pocket. And there's like 4 billion people who use the different apps that we use. And it's like, I'm grateful that that platform exists, but we didn't play any role. and basically building those phones because, I mean, it was kind of getting worked on while I was still just trying to make the first website that I was making into a thing.

5. 2:22:29

   And on the one hand, it's been great because now pretty much everyone in the world has a phone and that kind of enables pretty amazing things. But on the other hand, like you're saying, they have used that platform to put in place a lot of rules that I think feel arbitrary and feel like they haven't really invented anything great in a while. and it's like steve jobs invented the the iphone and now they're just kind of sitting on it 20 years later and you know 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 um i think 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

6. 2:23:22

   been flat to declining so how are they making more money as a company well they do it by basically like squeezing people and like you're saying like having this 30 tax on developers um by getting you to buy more peripherals and things that plug into it um you know 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.

7. 2:23:58

   So, I mean, there are a lot of other companies in the world that would be able to. Build like a very good earbud. Apple has a specific protocol that they've built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it, and it's just much more seamless because they've enabled that, but they don't let anyone else use the protocol. Well, if they did, there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there.

8. 2:24:26

   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, right? I mean, we have, you know, we basically asked them for the Ray-Ban metaglasses that we built. Can we basically use the protocol that you use for AirPod and some of these other things to just make it so we can as easily connect?

9. 2:24:58

   So it's not like, you know, a pain in the ass for people who want to use this. And, you know, I think one of the protocols they've used that they built, they basically didn't encrypt it. so it's like plain text um 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 in an easy way it's like the whole thing is kind of wild um and i'm pretty optimistic that just because they've been so off their game in terms of not really releasing many innovative things that eventually i mean the good news about the tech industry is it's like it's just super dynamic and things are constantly getting invented and i think company is if you just don't do a good job for like 10 years

10. 2:25:52

    eventually you're just going to get beat by someone um but i don't know i mean at some point i did this like back of the envelope calculation of like all the random rules that apple puts out um if you know if they didn't apply like i think you know it's like and this is just meta i think we'd like make twice as much profit or something and and that's just us i mean it's like all these small companies that like probably can't even exist because of the taxes that they put in place so yeah i i think it's a it's a big issue i wish that they would just kind of get back to building good things and not having their ability to compete be connected to just like advantaging their stuff because i'm pretty sure what they're going to do is like they're going to take something like this ray-ban meta you know category that we've kind of created with

11. 2:26:45

    ray-ban and the company that built that there's like the really great ai glasses and i'm pretty sure Apple's just going to like try to build a version of that, but then just like advantage how it connects to the phone. And well, they did that with their AR goggle thing, but it's not very successful. No, that one, they didn't actually connect into the rest of their ecosystem. But I mean, look, I mean, they shipped something for $3,500 that I think is worse than the thing that we shipped for $300 or $400. So I mean, that clearly was not going to work very well. Now, Now, I mean, look, I mean, they're a good technology company.

12. 2:27:23

    I think their second and third version will probably be better than their first version.