Apple and Meta, two of the biggest tech companies in the world, are not very close. The firms have clashed on various occasions over the years. Apple has always been outspoken in its criticism of Facebook's handling of user data and privacy. Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature affected Meta, and the company acknowledged that as a result of Apple, it had lost close to $10 billion. Now that Meta has switched to the metaverse, the company is placing significant bets on it. If rumours are to be believed, Apple is reportedly getting ready to release an AR/VR headset that will compete with Meta's VR headgear.
CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg discussed a range of topics in an interview with The Verge, including his opinion of Apple entering the VR/AR market. Regarding Apple's mixed reality headset, Zuckerberg said, “I mean, it’s certainly plausible that they see this competition in the future and want to hinder us.”
Zuckerberg also suggested that Apple's "holier-than-thou" attitude may not be as extreme as it seems. “I think one thing that’s been pretty clear is that their motives in doing the things that they’re doing are not as altruistic as they claim them to be. I’m sure that they believe, at some level, in the things that they’re doing and think that they’re good for their customers, but it can’t just be a coincidence that it also aligns very well with their strategy,” he said. On the purpose of Meta's desire for an "open" ecosystem.
In an apparent dig at Apple, the CEO of Meta stated that all of the actions the firm will make in the new market will be about partnerships rather than shutting down the ecosystem. I think the closed ecosystem has won in the mobile space, Zuckerberg said, adding that “so our goal and how we approach this is not just to help build the open ecosystem in partnership with all these other companies but to make sure that, in this generation of computing, the open ecosystem wins again.”
The goal of Meta, he continued, is to create an “open ecosystem for the next generation of computing around virtual and augmented reality in the metaverse more broadly, which means that there are going to need to be all these partnerships.”
