Apple Live Rent Free Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Head

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg sees metaversion as an amazing new stage of technology full of opportunities to work, play and communicate. You could follow an Imax movie on the moonorganize a work meeting in a tavern inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean or hit the stage with your favorite musician.

But as you watch the meta-version unfold, Zuckerberg prepares for what appears to be the fight of his life. His opponent is Apple.

During his Meta Connect conference last week, Zuckerberg laid out his vision for the future, including games like Iron Man VRset a business productivity application from Microsoft and new A $1,500 headset called the Quest Pro, whose top feature is sensors that can read your actual facial expression. Yet in several notable moments in the 82-minute presentation, he also attacked Apple without saying its name.

Zuckerberg took veiled jabs at Apple over everything from its secretive nature to its business model, profiting primarily from hardware rather than advertising. He also attacked Apple’s “closed” ecosystem approach to app development, moving all iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps through the App Store. While the approach, where apps are screened for security issues and judged against the company’s editorial standards, has helped create massive companies like Uber and TikTok, it’s also under scrutiny over antitrust concerns.

“In every generation of computing, there’s an open ecosystem and a closed ecosystem,” Zuckerberg said, referencing the tech industry’s past battles between platforms. PC and Mac computersand Google’s Android software versus Apple’s iOS. The tight control Apple applies creates lock-in, Zuckerberg said, which helps Apple’s profits. Metaversion, he said, shouldn’t be like that. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment on Zuckerberg’s jabs.)

Zuckerberg’s attacks on Apple are not new – he has been an outspoken critic of the company dating back to the first iPad more than a decade ago. But they happened during one of its most important events of the year and mark what could be the opening salvo of the next big tech battle.

On Monday, he expanded his attacks and unveiled a billboard The goal was over New York City he traded extensively with Pennsylvania Station and promoted his company’s WhatsApp messaging service as more reliable than Apple’s popular iMessage.

Read more: Meta Quest Pro Hands-On: A $1,500 Leap into the Future of Mixed Reality

In the not-too-distant future, both companies believe we will wear technology on your head which are capable of superimposing computer images on the real world (augmented reality) or bringing us to immersive computer-generated lands (virtual reality). could start a new wave of growth in technology. Today, the technology industry already sells hundreds of millions of computers and more than 1.5 billion smartphones annually.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has said he believes his preferred “reality” technology, AR, will profoundly change our world in a similar way that the internet has over the past few decades. “We really look back and think about how we used to live without AR,” he told Dutch publication Bright last month.

Zuckerberg believes much the same about the metaverse, the shared digital worlds his team is helping to build. “We believe in this vision so deeply that we have renamed our entire company after it,” he said last week. “And now we’re at a point where a lot of technology is starting to take off that will drive the meta-versions.”

It’s telling that Zuckerberg fired back before Apple even released a set of AR glasses that had been rumored for years.

Opened and closed

Apple has not publicly acknowledged the reports from multiple sites, including CNET, about the upcoming headset.

Instead, the company has publicly focused its efforts on adding more features to its iPhones and iPads. In 2017, it announced the AR Kit, a set of software tools that help developers create apps that can interact with the real world. Notable AR apps for iPhone including Pokémon Go, where players “catch” cartoon monsters after searching for them through the camera and screen. It’s there too Instead of Ikeaan app that measures the space in your home and shows what the company’s furniture would look like if placed there.

Apple will have to choose the right moment to announce its headset, analysts say. Although it’s rarely the first to announce new devices – there were many audio players and plenty of smartphones before the iPod before the iPhone — Apple is known for ultimately offering “better solutions,” Strategy Analytics analyst Tim Bajarin wrote after Meta’s announcement last week. “This includes innovative designs for said devices and includes easy-to-use software and services,” he added. “If history is any guide, Apple is innovating some form of headset that’s easy to use and includes apps and services.”

While many Apple employees and industry observers are eager for the company’s headset to make its debut, they also often joke that Apple’s CEO will probably never use Zuckerberg’s watchword for the future — “metaverse” — to describe his company’s products. “I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what a metaversion is,” Cook told Bright in a September interview.

Part of the reason for Apple’s swipe at Meta is likely because the iPhone maker believes Zuckerberg’s company is its biggest competitor in the industry. After all, the Meta Quest 2 headset is believable one of the best-selling VR devices to date. It also won a CNET Editor’s Choice earlier this year, despite being available since 2019. Scott Stein wrote in your review.

Read more: Quest Pro, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Zuck Avatar: All Announced at Meta Connect

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

“The meta just knows they need some edge to even have a fighting chance,” he added.

Zuckerberg got some head start eight years ago when Facebook bought then-startup Oculus VR for more than $2 billion. This has helped his own company’s VR app business reach $1.5 billion in revenue so far, with 33 titles surpassing $10 million in gross sales.

Now Zuckerberg is trying not only to create apps for his device, but also to fight the upcoming war against Apple.

“We’re at the beginning of a new era, and big changes in computing like this don’t happen very often,” Zuckerberg said last week. “I see our role as not only helping to build this open ecosystem, but also helping to ensure that the open ecosystem wins in this new generation of the Internet.”