Apple's Tim Cook gifts new iPhone 5 to Mark Zuckerberg
In a "Today Show" interview, Zuck calls the new handset "a wonderful device," then quickly turns the conversation toward Facebook's mobile presence.
Having nearly a billion friends has its perks, especially when one of them is Tim Cook sending you a free iPhone 5.
The Apple CEO sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg one of Apple's new handsets gratis, the Facebook chief executive told Matt Lauer of "The Today Show' in an interview. "It's a wonderful device," Zuckerberg told Lauer during an interview scheduled to run Thursday, steering the conversation more toward Facebook's mobile presence.
iPhone is a great platform. There are more people who use Facebook on Android -- because Android is just -- more people use it, at this point. And the thing that I think a lot of people don't think about is that there are actually more people in the world using Facebook on mobile Web, right, so not using the apps on iOS or Android, but actually just going to a browser on a phone. There are more people doing that than the iPhone and all of Android phones combined, right? So it's actually a pretty diverse ecosystem.
This type of gesture is normally reserved for important business partners or public figures, so it's really no surprise that Zuckerberg would be a recipient. The two companies have become much more friendly with tighter integration between Facebook and Apple's iOS and OS X.
But they weren't always so cordial. In 2010, Zuckerberg reportedly dissed the iPhone on his Facebook page, saying that he needed four charges to keep it charged "and a landline so I can actually make calls." The post quickly vanished, and perhaps he will be happier with the new handset, which has a larger battery with greater capacity.
Zuckerberg also revealed that -- shocker -- he's not much of a clothes horse.
"I wear the same thing every day, right? I mean, it's literally, if you could see my closet," he said, adding that he has "about 20" of the same gray T-shirt.