The race for the next generation of consumer computing, AI and personal data
I am down with a fever, which has given me the chance to catch up on reading, watching films and shows, and tuning into various podcasts and interviews. Lately, I’ve focused on interviews given by Mark Zuckerberg over the past 8-9 months. Beyond his noticeable shift in fashion, the ideas he discusses strongly align with the vision he’s been developing over the last decade. Or it is best to say that the ideas are actually realizations he has had over the last decade.
Let’s quickly recap some of the major events between 2014 and 2024. This is by no means an exhaustive list but rather a reflection on key moments from the past decade:
2014: After the failure of its hardware venture with the “Facebook Phone,” Meta (then still Facebook) acquired WhatsApp and Oculus.
2016: Donald Trump was elected president, marking a shift in the relationship between institutions, Big Tech, the media, and the public.
2018: The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how political campaigns used data to create psychographic profiles, identifying users’ personality traits based on their Facebook activity.
2018: Facebook’s involvement in enabling the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar was brought to light.
2019: Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress, facing questions about Facebook’s practices.
2021: The “Facebook Files” were released, revealing Facebook’s role in enabling objectionable speech and violence in countries such as India, Ethiopia, and the Philippines.
2021: Facebook rebranded itself as Meta.
Mark recently sat down for an interview with Ben and David on the Acquired podcast LIVE at San Francisco’s Chase Center. Right off the bat, he mentioned that he no longer feels the need to apologize. This version of Mark comes across as more confident, even a bit cocky, despite the occasional awkward quip. However, that’s not the focus here—I’m not a body language expert, nor is that my interest. But I did see a really funny post that encapsulates the whole situation.
What’s noteworthy in this interview is how he frames Meta, not as a social media company, but as one focused on “social connection” and “social experience.” This shift is most evident when he talks about smart glasses, which have become his central talking point for presenting his vision and reflecting on his 20-year journey as CEO. It’s important to note that in his conversations, it’s either the smart glasses, the VR headset, or AI that serve as the main hooks for introducing his ideas.
Mark explains that Facebook emerged during a period when the world was shifting from the web to mobile devices as the primary medium for personal computing. He acknowledges that neither he nor his company played a major role in shaping this new platform. You and I, both know that they did make attempts, such as with the Facebook Phone, though he rarely mentions it since it wasn’t a success.
The Apple-Google duopoly
What Mark is suggesting is the advantage Apple and Google have as the largest hardware and OS manufacturers in the world. Because they control both the hardware and operating systems, they set the rules for platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and even mobile games—which generate substantial revenue—leaving these apps at the mercy of the two tech giants.
Apple and Google traditionally take a cut (historically 30%) from direct subscriptions or in-app purchases, essentially charging developers a commission. This is why, for instance, when you try to subscribe to Netflix, it directs you to do so via the web instead of through the app on your phone, and the option to subscribe within the app is deliberately absent, despite the inconvenience this creates. Moreover, since they also control their respective app stores, Apple and Google can give preferential treatment to certain partners. A recent revelation showed that Google and Spotify had a secret deal that allowed Spotify to largely bypass Android’s app store fees. Small developers don’t enjoy such treatment.
Apple’s privacy-focused features (which I love and recommend) have significantly impacted Meta’s ad-tracking capabilities, which in turn has hurt its revenue. However, it’s worth noting that Apple has a long-standing deal with Google, where Google pays billions of dollars to remain the default search engine on Safari, Apple’s browser—a fact that is widely known. So, this makes its promise of privacy-focused features relatively useless since it has put business first over privacy. Apple has also consistently argued against side-loading apps, citing security concerns. While this is understandable to some extent, the reality is that hundreds of fraudulent apps still circulate through Apple’s own App Store every day, with little action taken to address the issue.
Google has also introduced features that can now create friction for users trying to side-load apps.
People in tech understand this very well and everyone, including Mark Zuckerberg, is racing to build the next-generation computing platform, the next iPhone!
How Apple and Google are doing it vs The Rest
In recent years, Apple has started producing its own computer chips, known as the M-series chips, which power devices like the MacBook, iMac, and iPad. These chips, often called Apple Silicon, are significantly superior to those made by its competitors.
This move caught the attention of the entire tech world, highlighting the benefits of in-house chip development. By doing so, companies like Apple can optimize these chips for their entire ecosystem of products—including the iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, and Apple Watch—creating a seamless, premium user experience (Apple products break your wallet so I guess it makes sense).
Google has followed suit, developing its own Tensor chips for its flagship Pixel devices. These chips enable features like call transcripts, generative AI for editing photos and videos, and advanced computational photography—defining what “smart” truly means in smartphones. Google now also makes its own smartwatches.
Apple has also been advertising its new iPhone, as made for “Apple Intelligence” from the ground up. It has also decided to rebuild Siri using Generative AI.
When you control an entire ecosystem, you can gradually focus your efforts on shaping the next generation of computing. Take Apple as an example—the Apple Vision Pro integrates seamlessly with the MacBook and AirPods, and if you own these, you’re likely using an Apple Watch and iPhone as well. Now imagine if, in the future, Apple manages to consolidate all these capabilities into just two devices: an Apple Watch on your wrist to track neural signals, and a Vision Pro that’s no bigger than a pair of sunglasses.
It’s definitely much more convenient than taking out your phone from your pocket every few minutes or checking your smartwatch. It could potentially be the next generation of computing.
When I think about others in the tech space, they’re not that different. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, for example, is looking to build his own chips and is also behind a crypto project called World Coin, which scans irises in exchange for a digital ID and free cryptocurrency. There’s a growing sense that chatbots aren’t the future of AI—people, especially investors and early adopters, want more from the technology.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is pouring money into AI but doesn’t seem focused on developing the next generation of computing devices. Instead, they’re refining how we interact with existing services—features like recall and generative AI in Bing. Honestly, it’s unclear exactly what Microsoft’s long-term strategy is, but they clearly want to establish themselves as a major player in AI, if that’s where the future is headed.
Elon Musk is fully invested in AI through his company xAI (having co-founded OpenAI), and he’s also developing a surveillance system on wheels—his cars—and a robot. He might have an edge over others, given the popularity of his vehicles, the constant presence of his Starlink satellites providing global internet, and his brain-interface company Neuralink. Investors seem to show unwavering confidence in him, by continuously pouring in money. So, perhaps that’s where the future of computing lies. Who knows?
This brings me back to Mark Zuckerberg. I believe Meta and Zuckerberg have evolved significantly, and the company is no longer just a social media platform (despite his attempts to reframe it as a “social experience” company). Today, Meta produces VR headsets called Meta Quest, and after going all-in on the Metaverse—which didn’t pan out—they’re now focusing on developing the smart glasses of the future. It is now both hardware and a software company.
The Orion: An engineering marvel with the same hurdle i.e., owning an existing ecosystem
Just five months ago, Mark gave an interview to Dwarkesh Patel, where he discussed the Llama models and Meta AI, which is powered by Llama. What intrigued me most was the part of the conversation about potentially open-sourcing the future model that might be worth $10 billion in research and development. Mark hinted that he might actually go through with it.
Here are Mark’s own words:
"That’s a question which we’ll have to evaluate as time goes on too. We have a long history of open sourcing software. We don’t tend to open source our product. We don't take the code for Instagram and make it open source. We take a lot of the low-level infrastructure and we make that open source. Probably the biggest one in our history was our Open Compute Project where we took the designs for all of our servers, network switches, and data centers, and made it open source and it ended up being super helpful. Although a lot of people can design servers, the industry is now standardized on our design, which meant that the supply chains basically all got built out around our design. So volumes went up, it got cheaper for everyone, and it saved us billions of dollars which was awesome. So there's multiple ways where open source could be helpful for us. One is if people figure out how to run the models more cheaply. We're going to be spending tens, or a hundred billion dollars or more over time on all this stuff. So, if we can do that 10% more efficiently, we're saving billions or tens of billions of dollars.”
To illustrate his point, Mark uses the analogy of the mobile ecosystem. He explains that there’s an economic side where platform owners take a percentage of profits, but there’s also a “qualitative version,” instances where they tried to roll out new features, but Apple blocked them, which, in his words, “sucks!”
From the perspective of a third-party observer like me, it all comes down to control. Everyone in the tech world wants to dominate the next ecosystem so they can set the rules—something Zuckerberg wasn’t able to do during the mobile computing era. Now, it’s a race to ensure that in future platforms, like VR, AR, or AI, companies like Meta can dictate the terms, avoiding the dependency they faced with mobile platforms like Apple’s iOS. This desire for ecosystem control is what drives many of the current innovations and strategic shifts in the tech world.
At Meta Connect last week, which is essentially Meta’s version of a developer conference, Mark showcased Orion, a prototype AR smart glasses that truly feels like the future of wearable tech. Custom-designed by Meta, these glasses feature Micro LED projectors built into the frame, projecting graphics in front of your eyes through waveguides embedded in the lenses. There are plenty of videos available on Orion, and I highly recommend checking them out.
As expected, Mark gave several interviews that day, and I came away with two key insights:
Orion is another step toward shaping the future of personal and wearable computing, aiming to be the first to set the rules for the next era of technology.
For everyday users like us, control over our own data remains limited—unless meaningful regulatory intervention comes into play.
Let me explain further:
Each Orion smart glass currently costs around $10,000 to produce, making it a prototype for now and potentially a developer kit in the near future. The Orion hardware is made up of three components: the glasses themselves, a “neural wristband” used to control them, and a wireless compute puck, which looks like a large battery pack for a phone. The glasses don’t require a phone or laptop to function, but if they’re more than about 12 feet away from the puck, they become unusable.
Now, consider Apple’s ecosystem. Apple already produces the Apple Watch, which could function as a neural wristband, and the iPhone, which might soon be powerful enough to serve as a compute puck. Plus, the new iPhones are built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence. Meta, on the other hand, doesn’t make a phone or a watch, which presents a significant challenge in making its AR glasses fully standalone. In contrast, Apple already has an advantage with its well-integrated ecosystem.
Once Meta overcomes these challenges, smart glasses could very well become the future of personal computing. However, we’re likely still a decade or two away from that reality.
Now, what do I mean by control over our data? While Meta Connect was happening, a “Goodbye Meta AI” copypasta started circulating on Instagram Stories, even being shared by celebrities like Tom Brady and James McAvoy. The post claims to prevent Meta from using personal data to train its AI models. Let’s be clear—posting something like this is far from being a legally binding statement.
However, it highlights the imbalance of power. Meta has a long history of privacy concerns, as noted earlier in the blog. And now, Mark Zuckerberg himself has made it clear that users may have little control over their data.
In the last few minutes of an interview given to Alex Heath of The Verge, Mark had to say the following:
“…I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content, right? So it’s, like, okay, maybe, like, in the grand scheme of this, right?So we have this set of challenges with news publishers around the world, which is, like, okay, a lot of folks are constantly asking to be paid for the content, and on the other hand, we have our community which is asking us to show less news because it makes them feel bad, right?”
I can’t predict exactly what the future of computing will look like. Sure, I appreciate stylish glasses, but I might be in the minority there. What I do know is that the future likely won’t be a radical departure from the present or the past. While we may see new forms of computing, the same underlying issues—privacy concerns, surveillance, platform dominance, and the monopolies or duopolies controlling our digital lives—are bound to persist. No matter how advanced technology becomes, these fundamental challenges will remain part of the landscape.
Editor’s note: The title has been updated.