Samsung mocks iPhone’s slow catch up

The iPhone X may be racking up good reviews and big sales across the board, but whatever Apple achieves with smartphones, Samsung managed first.

Or at least that’s the narrative portrayed in a new Samsung ad which, shockingly, decides to focus less on what Samsung is doing doing right now than on taking shots at Apple.

Check it out below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R59TevgzN3k

The ad mocks Apple for a range of apparent sins, from lack of internal storage space on early iPhones to waterproofing to phablet-sized phones to Qi charging, suggesting that Apple is always one step behind its South Korean tech rival.

Of course, what Samsung’s ad doesn’t do is to compare the respective features — such as its disappointing facial recognition next to the widely praised Face ID feature on the new iPhone X, or iOS versus its own Samsung Experience reskinned Android operating system.

It also seems to miss the fundamental importance of the fact that it’s not just who creates a new feature first, but rather who does it well that matters.

Samsung might want to lay off the jokes a little bit, however: Due to its work as a manufacturer for Apple, Samsung is likely to make billions of dollars more in revenue making parts for the iPhone X than it does from the parts it manufactures for the Galaxy S8 handset.

Then again, rushing products to market to beat Apple can backfire — as was the case with the ill-fated Note 7, which Samsung reportedly developed quickly to try and beat Apple, with disastrous results.

Luke Dormehl

Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.