Peter Thiel, obviously, is not a fan of the iPhone Duo.
In fact, the billionaire PayPal founder and tech investor says he hasn’t been very impressed with anything Apple has done since its eccentric founder, Steve Jobs, died of cancer in 2011.
“As far as I can tell, there’s nothing new after Jobs,” Thiel said of the iPhone maker in a September interview with author Walter Isaacson for “Podcast Builder,” released Thursday.
“It turns out, yeah, the cell phone is this giant invention — there’s nothing left to do,” he said. “Then it’s just scale and branding and building over 15 years or whatever.”
Indeed, Apple has faced criticism for failing to innovate beyond mobile phones and tablets, especially in the era of AI, where its “Siri” product is not as advanced as competitors from ChatGPT or Anthropic.
Jobs announced the first iPhone in 2007 at a conference in San Francisco. Nearly 20 years later, Apple released its 18th iteration this week, with one caveat: It folds.
That said, the MacBook is the de facto laptop for many AI-nerds and normies alike. iPhones are everywhere, and the sleek design of AirPods followed suit when they were released in 2016.
Although Thiel told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times in 2017 that Apple’s era was over, the company’s stock price has risen steadily since then.
Thiel doesn’t pooh-pooh Apple at all. He called it a “pure, well-managed value stock,” but lamented what he described as a loss of vision after Jobs’ death.
“I would still say that Elon or Steve Jobs are better for society than Tim Cook,” he said.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent on Saturday.