Mark Zuckerberg says Apple’s culture is very different than Meta’s — and the two rivals will be battling on multiple fronts

Mark Zuckerberg anticipates Apple will be Meta’s “primary competitor” in the next 10 to 15 years.

Meta and Apple have increasingly been rivals, and Mark Zuckerberg only expects their competition to intensify in the coming years.

The Meta CEO spoke about differences in the companies’ cultures during a recent live appearance of the “Acquired” podcast that was released Wednesday.

“I think in a lot of ways we’re like the opposite of Apple,” he said. “Clearly, their stuff has worked really well too. They take this approach that’s like, ‘We’re going to take a long time, we’re going to polish it, we’re going to put it out,’ and maybe for the stuff that they’re doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture.”

Zuckerberg went on to say Meta approaches product releases differently, saying, “there are a lot of conversations that we have internally where you’re almost at the line of being embarrassed at what you put out.”

“You want to really have a culture that values shipping and getting things out and getting feedback more than needing always to get great positive accolades from people when you put stuff out,” he continued.

He also took the opportunity to critique Apple’s approach.

“If you want to wait until you get praised all the time, you’re missing a bunch of the time when you could’ve learned a bunch of useful stuff and then incorporated that into the next version you’re going to ship,” he said.

Later in the podcast, Zuckerberg also talked about the future of the two companies’ relationship, saying people don’t necessarily think of Apple as one of Meta’s chief rivals but it’s “a bigger competitor than people realize.”

Zuck said one of his goals for the next 10 or 15 years is “to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win.”

Apple and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Facebook cofounder has spoken publicly in favor of open platforms as opposed to Apple’s famous “walled garden,” in which the iPhone maker carefully controls its hardware and software ecosystem — rules that Zuckerberg is tired of having to follow as an app-maker for the platform.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that there are “advantages of doing a closed and integrated model” and that he thinks Apple will be Meta’s “primary competitor” — but not just on the product side.

Their differences extend to their core values.

“I think it’s in some ways very deeply values-driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be and how open these platforms, whether it’s things like Llama and AI or the glasses or different things, should be for developers.”

Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, on the other hand, doesn’t view Meta as one of his company’s biggest rivals.

“Oh, I think that we compete in some things,” Cook told The New York Times in 2021. “But no, if I was asked who our biggest competitors are, they would not be listed. We’re not in the social networking business.”

But since then, Apple has launched the Vision Pro headset — competing directly with Meta’s lower-priced Quest headset, and the company has been growing its advertising business and readying its own generative AI product, Apple Intelligence, which begins rolling out to iPhones in October. (Zuckerberg is betting big on headsets, the metaverse, and its Meta AI, but the company continues to make most of its money from advertising.)

So while it may not have been the rivalry Silicon Valley predicted a decade ago, Zuckerberg is clearly preparing for a long-term battle.