As it turns out, John Ternus, 51, the CEO of Cupertino, California-based iPhone maker Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), had never posted publicly on social media before he took over on Sept. 1 from outgoing CEO Tim Cook, 65, who’s now Apple’s executive chairman. That same day he succeeded Cook, Ternus posted on X for the first time with a one-word greeting.
Apple itself, for that matter, set up an @apple account on Threads in July 2025, and 4.8 million people who already followed Apple on Instagram showed up as followers right away. But as 9to5Mac editor-in-chief Chance Miller pointed out on X, the company still isn’t active there, which is what made Zuckerberg’s detour to X so fascinating to him.
It looks like a far cry from the way Zuckerberg talked about Apple in January 2025, when he told Joe Rogan on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that the company hadn’t “really invented anything great in a while.” Zuck did credit the iPhone as a hugely important invention in that same conversation, but argued Apple had been coasting on it ever since.
Here’s what the two companies built together, why they’ve been at odds for years and what the deal could mean for your money. Neither Meta nor Apple immediately returned Moneywise’s requests for comment.
What did Meta and Apple actually build?
Meta’s new model is called Muse Spark Open, and the social-networking giant is letting people download it at no cost. In practice, that means a company can run it on its own computers rather than paying to use it through the cloud.
Meta says it’s stronger than any other downloadable AI model from an American developer. Businesses can use it, too, though Meta’s license attaches conditions to commercial use.
Because the model is so big, with 816 billion parameters (the internal settings it learns during training), it won’t run on just one Mac Studio. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, 29, told Axios the project with Apple had been months in the making. In Apple’s own tests, the model ran on either two or four Mac Studios hooked together, each with Apple’s M5 Ultra chip.
(In case you’re wondering: A Mac Studio with the M5 Ultra starts at $5,499, and that’s before adding the extra memory a model this big needs. Meta’s own setup calls for two Mac Studios with 512GB each.)
Ternus, for his part, replied to Zuckerberg’s post the same day, congratulating Meta’s team and talking up the Mac Studio for on-device AI. Over at Meta, Wang joked to Axios that the company was “excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again.” He also credited Daniel Gross, an Apple alum who’s now at Meta, with helping smooth things over between the two companies.
Why did Apple and Meta fall out in the first place?
The short answer is privacy, and how each company makes its money. Back in 2018, as Facebook reeled from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cook was asked at an MSNBC and Recode town hall how he’d handle things if he were Zuckerberg, and he said he’d never have gotten himself into that mess. A few days later, Zuckerberg dismissed the idea that a free service can’t look out for its users as “extremely glib” in an interview on Vox’s “The Ezra Klein Show.”
