Apple’s Living Rent Free in Mark Zuckerberg’s mind

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg sees the Metaverse as a wondrous new stage of technology, brimming with ways to work, play, and communicate. you could watch Imax film on the moonhost a work meeting at a Pirates of the Caribbean inspired tavern or rock on stage with your favorite musicians.

But as you watch the metaverse unfold, Zuckerberg prepares for the fight of his life. His opponent is Apple.

During his keynote address at the Meta Connect conference last week, Zuckerberg laid out his vision for the future, including Games like Iron Man VRa suite of Enterprise productivity apps from Microsoft and a new one $1,500 headset called the Quest Pro, whose top feature includes sensors that can read your real-life facial expressions. However, at several notable points in the 82-minute presentation, he also attacked Apple without giving his name.

In veiled jabs, Zuckerberg attacked Apple for everything from its secretive nature to its business model, profiting mostly from hardware rather than advertising. He also attacked Apple’s “closed” ecosystem approach to app development, which routes all iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps through the App Store. While this approach, in which apps are screened for security issues and judged against the company’s editorial standards, helped launch giant companies like Uber and TikTok, it’s also come under scrutiny over antitrust concerns.

“In every generation of computers, there’s been an open ecosystem and a closed ecosystem,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the tech industry’s past platform struggles PCs and Mac computersand Google’s Android software versus Apple’s iOS. The tight control Apple exercises creates lock-ins, Zuckerberg said, which helps Apple’s profits. The metaverse, he said, was not meant to be like this. (Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment on Zuckerberg’s jabs.)

Zuckerberg’s attacks on Apple aren’t new — he’s openly criticized the company since the first iPad more than a decade ago. But these took place during one of its most important events of the year, and it potentially marks the beginning of technology’s next great battle.

He escalated his attacks on Monday, unveiling a billboard Meta paid more than New York City widely used Pennsylvania Station and touts his company’s WhatsApp messaging service as more reliable than Apple’s popular iMessage.

Continue reading: Meta Quest Pro Hands-On: A $1,500 leap into the future of mixed reality

Both companies believe that we will do so in the not too distant future carry technologies on our heads capable of overlaying computer images onto the real world (augmented reality) or taking us into immersive computer-generated lands (virtual reality). could trigger a new wave of growth in the technology sector. The tech industry already sells hundreds of millions of PCs and more than 1.5 billion smartphones every year.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said he believes his favorite “reality” technology, AR, will profoundly transform our world in much the same way the internet has done over the past several decades. “We’re really going to look back and think about how we once lived without AR,” he told Dutch publication Bright last month.

Zuckerberg believes the same about the Metaverse, the shared digital worlds his team is helping to build. “We believe in that vision so much that we rebranded our entire company after it,” he said last week. “And we are now at a moment where many of the technologies that will power the metaverse are beginning to take off.”

It’s telling that Zuckerberg fired his shots before Apple even released AR glasses that have been rumored for years.

Open and closed

Apple has not publicly confirmed the coverage from many outlets, including CNET. about his upcoming headset.

Instead, the company has publicly focused its efforts on adding more features to its iPhones and iPads. In 2017, it announced AR Kit, a suite of software tools to help developers create apps that can interact with the real world. Notable AR apps for iPhone belong to Pokemon Go, where players “catch” cartoon monsters after searching for them through the camera and screen. There are also Ikea squarean app that measures a room in your house and shows what the company’s furniture would look like when placed there.

Apple needs to pick the right moment to announce its headset, analysts say. Although it’s rarely the first to announce new devices – there were many audio players before the iPod and many smartphones before the iPhone — Apple has a reputation for offering “a better solution” at some point, wrote Strategy Analytics analyst Tim Bajarin following Meta’s announcements last week. “This includes innovative designs of these devices as well as easy-to-use software and services,” he added. “If history is any guide, Apple will innovate with a form of headset that’s easy to use and includes apps and services.”

While many Apple employees and industry watchers eagerly await when the company’s headset will make its debut, they also often joke that Apple’s CEO will likely never use Zuckerberg’s catchphrase of the future – “Metaverse” – to describe his company’s products to describe. “I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the metaverse is,” Cook told Bright in that September interview.

Part of the reason for Apple’s attacks on Meta is likely because the iPhone maker believes that Zuckerberg’s company is its biggest competitor in the industry. After all, the Meta Quest 2 headset is supposed to be one of the best-selling VR devices to date. It was also recognized by CNET Editor’s Choice earlier this year, although it’s been available since 2019. “It’s still the VR headset to beat,” CNET’s Scott Stein wrote in his review.

Continue reading: Quest Pro, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Zuck Avatar: Everything announced at Meta Connect

Ansel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, noted that for all the talk about the Metaverse, Zuckerberg also described the company’s new Quest Pro headset as a device for AR development and also for business applications. That expansion beyond gaming and Internet communications is key to Zuckerberg’s case, he said. “This is another one of those platform wars where Apple kind of stands on its own and then everyone else competes to compete with Apple.”

“Meta just know they need a head start to even have a chance,” he added.

Zuckerberg had part of that lead eight years ago when Facebook bought then-startup Oculus VR for more than $2 billion. That has helped his own company’s VR app store generate $1.5 billion in revenue to date, with 33 titles grossing over $10 million.

Now, Zuckerberg is advocating not only developing apps for his device, but also fighting his upcoming war against Apple.

“We’re at the dawn of a new era, and big changes like this don’t happen that often,” Zuckerberg said last week. “I see our role not only in helping build this open ecosystem, but in ensuring that the open ecosystem prevails in this next generation of the internet.”