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by alex1138 37 days ago
Do you know what Zuckerberg said in an interview? I think it was to Lex Fridman but I could be wrong

"Apple hasn't come up with anything new in 20 years"

Very likely in response to Apple's granularity. Poor Zuck can't steal people's credentials

2 comments

I’m less impressed with Zuck every time I hear something new about him.

Apple has made incredible progress in the last 20 years, but almost none of that has been a brand new product. It has all been evolving the existing products and on building the world’s best supply chain and rearing incredible market share from Windows. To be clear, AirPods are a much bigger market than Nike shoes. Those, plus Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro are new in the last 20 years.

In the past 20 years, the Facebook website has evolved, but all of the other major investments by the company have been acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. Diem (or whatever that proprietary cryptocurrency was called) and the Metaverse were massive failures. I don’t know what to credit Meta for in the AI era except some of the LLAMA tooling and some open weights LLMs. CZI is doing cool things, but that’s Zuck’s private science company, not part of Meta.

Anything groundbreaking in advertising? Meta ad tools are pretty granular.

(Looking for anything here!)

Facebook “allowed” Cambridge-Analytica to Hoover up a massive amount of psychometric data on US voters before the 2016 election (ins care quotes because they “allowed” it in the sense they prevented it by policy but did nothing significant to deter the data collection at scale).

I would argue that FB’s bigger wins have been in being the first app / website to get perhaps 50% of the world population using it, and also the Herculean effort it took to moderate that’s volume of content (whether or not you agree that moderation was the right choice or successful).

Profiting off of a genocide is a first in the social media world, pretty ground breaking. Especially when you find out that workers and management knew about it as it was on-going but did nothing in response. Truly such innovative people, surely they deserve all the money and non of the responsibility. It is a meritocracy after all.
Not a fan of zack (quite the opposite), but he isn't wrong here. Apple indeed didn't come up with anything new. Their PR stunts each year are more and more laughable as time goes by.

Neither did Meta, but that's a different discussion

The iPhone and Apple Watch don't count in your book? They are both younger than 20 years. I think the iPhone changed the mobile market. I don't think it was for the better but it was 'new'. It might also be just where I live but I see more Apple Watches than any other digital watches. Maybe not as 'new' but they certainly changed the watch market as well, for better or worse.

I can't think of a single new thing Facebook did in 20 years that stuck. Metaverse?

Fair enough, for some reason I thought iphone is older than 20 years. iPhone was indeed a great product and it changed market, no doubt about it.

Apple Watch doesn't really count in my books - it's just a silly toy without much practical use (of course YMMV).

> I can't think of a single new thing Facebook did in 20 years that stuck

Again, I am not a fan of Meta. They didn't invent anything, arguably including FB itself, but again, this is topic for a separate discussion.