Meta ($META) & Apple ($AAPL) – Making Up? – June 29, 2024
Apple’s cross-app data sharing restrictions threw a large wrench in Meta’s business and all other social media players. It forced the company to embark on a painful multi-year investment cycle to address the signaling gap. And it pushed Meta to embrace the Quest hardware headset in its pursuit of controlling the next computing platform. Many think this move from Apple, which was brilliantly masked as a privacy ploy, was targeted at Meta specifically. I tend to agree. That’s why I was surprised to read about Apple and Meta AI exploring a partnership for Apple’s planned AI hardware.
A few things here. First, talks are still preliminary and some are reporting that they’ve already fizzled out. Secondly, Apple has explicitly told us about its plans to work with many, many model providers. That’s what makes sense; that’s its plan. Regardless, I can’t help but find it a tad encouraging that these bellwethers are even willing to come to the table to discuss something like this. Large corporate enemies breed market inefficiency. Just get along.
