Cnn
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People do not associate as much on Facebook these days. The iPhone may not feel necessary in a decade. And Google research on one of the most popular smartphones in the world are decreasing.
These are some of the unusual admissions of two distinct antitrust trials against Meta and Google. It was a rare recognition of technological leaders that the formerly cut Edge products on which their business was founded could one day lose their relevance.
Silicon Valley is proud of innovation, change and a constant quest to find “the next great thing”. The relevance race is constant.
However, admissions Underline the mounting pressure that technology giants are faced with new threats to artificial intelligence and new social media applications – and how much product can be left behind.
Apple did not respond to the CNN comment request. A Google spokesperson underlined the company’s public statements, while Meta spokesperson directed CNN to specific responses from the audience testimony of CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The three technology giants have helped shape the modern network in the past two decades.
Google’s search engine triumphed in the late 1990s and the early 2000s due to its system to classify results by relevance and importance rather than sorting them by subject.
And Meta, the Facebook parent company, is largely responsible for the transformation of social platforms into an addictive flow of likes, comments and other interactions.
Funding these two trends was the smartphone, allowing users to access these services from almost anywhere, for which Apple prepared the field with the first iPhone in 2007.
The success of these products has catapulted Apple, Google and Meta into mega-evaluations. But during the testimony of the courtroom, the leaders indicated that consumers lose interest in some of the tasks even that Facebook and Google were initially designed.
Eddy Cue, main vice-president of Apple services, revealed last week that Google Search queries on its devices had decreased for the first time last month, according to Bloomberg. The comments came during his testimony in the antitrust trial of the Ministry of Justice against Google. (Google pays Apple to be the default search engine in the iPhone manufacturer’s safari browser.)
This is another sign that consumers can move to AI chatbots to fulfill some of the tasks of a traditional search engine. Market research firm Gartner estimated last year that the volume of search engines would drop by 25% by 2026 while consumers would revolve to AI tools.
Google said in a statement on Wednesday that it continues to “see the overall growth in research requests”, and this includes “an increase in the total of requests from Apple devices and platforms”.
Meta, too, consults consumers moving away from its original use case: adding friends and sharing content.
“The amount that people share with friends on Facebook, in particular, have decreased,” said meta-PDG Mark Zuckerberg during a trial in April for a antitrust trial brought by the Federal Trade Commission. “Even the quantity of new friends that people add … I think I have decreased. But I don’t know the exact figures. ”
Instead, Zuckerberg said the company had seen a big boost in direct messages.
Zuckerberg’s comments come as the search shows Facebook is late on other online platforms with younger crowds. A report by Pew Research Center in December has revealed that the use of Facebook has dropped over the past 10 years, with only 32% of adolescents saying that they used what was previously the namesake social network of Meta. This is compared to 71% in 2014 and 2015, although adolescents still use Instagram frequently.
Meta aggressively shaped her applications to follow the new trends. In 2013, Facebook did not buy Snapchat, but about three years later, he presented his own alternative in Instagram Stories. The short video flow of Instagram, known as coils, came to face Tiktok in 2020, and Zuckerberg said in his testimony that video content is the place where people spend most of their time on Facebook these days.
Even the iPhone may risk losing its favor During the next decade, said an Apple director.
“You may not need an iPhone in 10 years, as crazy as it may seem,” said Apple picked when he testified to the courtroom in the Google trial, according to Bloomberg.
With 19% of the world smartphone Expeditions in the first quarter of 2025, according to the International Data Corporation, Apple’s iPhone is the second most popular smartphone brand in the world.
But Apple, as well as other technological giants, are determined to understand what comes next.
And the answer could be smart glasses that use AI to analyze the world around you to perform tasks without reaching your phone – a vision on which Meta, Samsung and Google are already betting. Zuckerberg said in his testimony that he believed that consumers will end up interacting with content through “smart and holograms” glasses, “deleting the need to use a” brilliant rectangle “to access digital platforms. The Amazon apparatus and services manager, Panos Panay, did not exclude the possibility of Alexa glasses equipped with camera similar to those offered by Meta in a CNN interview in February.
Apple also thinks that the next step in computer science will involve devices on the face, as evidenced by the pro vision of $ 3,500. This device, although niche, could be a precursor of the types of smart glasses that Apple competitors work or are currently selling.
At the same time, consumers do not upgrade their phones as often now that mobile devices no longer change spectacular each year.
For the moment, consumers will continue to scroll through Instagram and type Google Search queries on their iPhones. And change is a good thing for business giants like these; This allows them to show Wall Street, there is still room to grow while stimulating their arguments to the legislators that they are facing rigid competition.
What changes, however, is that technological companies that governed the early 2000s and 2010s may have to fight a little more to stay ahead of the curve.
