Celebrities like Samsung phones, but they love marketing paychecks even more.
The wave of Samsung-sponsored selfies that started with massive retweets at the Oscars, has become one of the most popular viral campaigns in the history of the Internet as everyone from Ellen to Big Papi have been spotted snapping Samsung-selfies in exchange for a fat paycheck.
And Apple is totally jealous.
In a blatant attempt to steal Apple’s thunder, Samsung has announced a conference to take place on May 28 — promising to kick start “a new conversation around health.”
Why is this stepping on Apple’s toes?
Because the very next week is Apple’s eagerly-anticipated Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) — where Apple is expected to introduce the first stages of its new health-tracking family of innovations, beginning with the Healthbook feature for iOS 8, and likely to later expand to include the iWatch.
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Back in the early 80s Apple greeted the arrival of IBM PCs with a snarky full page newspaper ad reading, “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.”
In the past few years, however, Apple’s claws haven’t come out all that often when it comes to taking rivals down a peg or two.
In fact, most of the recent sideways swipes involving Apple tend to be other companies (normally Samsung) taking shots at Apple, rather than the other way around.
Well, the tables have turned in a new print ad which appeared in the UK’s Guardian and free commuter paper Metro today.
The Apple vs Samsung legal battle has been full of low points for both companies as they spare for global domination, but an email from Samsung’s VP of Sales fired off just two days after Steve Jobs’ death shows how heartless the war has gotten.
Shortly after Jobs’ passing in 2011, Michael Pennington, head of national sales for Samsung Telecommunications America, told company leadership in an email acquired by CNET that Steve’s death was the best opportunity Samsung was going to get to attack the iPhone.
Here’s the full email:
Apple is one of several tech giants to enter a voluntary agreement to add a global anti-theft “kill-switch” to their handsets from July 2015.
Other companies on board include Google, HTC, Huawei, Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia, and Samsung — while carriers have reportedly agreed to help “facilitate these measures.”
Apple’s support of the need for a kill-switch doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. The company added an Activation Lock with iOS 7, designed to make it tougher for thieves to use stolen iOS devices. The feature allows users to remotely locate, lock and wipe their iPhones if they are stolen.
Samsung has redesigned its SD and microSD cards with color coding that makes it easier to spot the difference between product lines – regular, Pro and Evo. Unfortunately, this is the wrong way to color-code cards.
Queue the spy music, cause on this week’s CultCast, our very own Buster Heine sneaks into Apple’s under-construction Arizona Sapphire Crystal factory and reports back what he’s found. Plus, WWDC dishes out golden tickets like they’re Willy Wonka; what you can do about HeartBleed; all that’s been revealed in the ongoing Apple V. Samsung trial; and you asked, so we answer: why we love Apple but would never want to work there.
Hem and haw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the audio adventure begin!
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Click on for the show notes.
When you’ve got $158.8 billion in the bank, there’s not a huge amount you need to be envious of.
But while Apple is beating rival Samsung on both the quality of its products and adverts, it is perhaps losing out when it comes to the kind of big digital media strategies that really attract attention (and customers) — like Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscars selfie which Publicis CEO Maurice Levy recently valued at between $800 million and $1 billion.
With that in mind, Apple is reportedly changing up its marketing approach to invest more in digital marketing and social media support — adding four new digital agencies to its roster.
How do you convince a jury you’re owed $2 billion in damages? If you’re Apple you hire an MIT-trained economist to do it for you.
While the patent war between Apple and Samsung continues to rage, Apple on Tuesday called economist Chris Vellturo to spell out exactly why Apple is asking to be paid $2 billion in damages ($2.19B to be exact) from arch-rival Samsung for infringing on five of its utility patents.
Phil Schiller took to the stand yesterday for the second day of Apple’s latest patent trial with Samsung.
Schiller mostly rehashed the same defense he used when the two companies met in court last November, also over a patent dispute — namely that Apple was the company which took the risk developing the iPhone, and that Samsung’s copying has hurt the company.
“I believe it has caused damage for Apple in the marketplace,” Schiller said. “It has caused people to question some of the innovations we’ve created and Apple’s role as the innovator. That challenge is made harder in the copying.”
Round two of what might be the biggest patent trial in tech history will be decided by a plumber, a police officer and a store clerk. Those blue-collar types are among the 10-person jury finalized Monday for the latest legal battle between Apple and Samsung.
“Jury picked,” tweeted San Jose Mercury News reporter Howard Mintz shortly after jury selection concluded. “Plumber, teacher, cop, secretary, store clerk, county worker, etc. Not [a] sniff of a tech geek to decide $billion patent trial.”
The most shocking revelation to come out of jury selection for the latest Apple-versus-Samsung trial isn’t that the Silicon Valley jury pool is loaded with people connected to one of the two companies. It’s that one potential juror claims ignorance when it comes to Apple’s nearly ubiquitous tablet.
“I’m kind of a dinosaur,” said one potential juror Monday. “I don’t even know what a iPad is.”
Apple and Samsung have become very acquainted with one another in the courtroom. Every since Apple’s crushing victory against Samsung in 2012 over patent infringement, the tech giants have been duking it out through a seemingly-endless string of appeals. The culmination of 2012’s verdict is a second trial that begins today in San Jose, California.
Much in this trial is the same as the last: Apple and Samsung are both accusing each other of copying patented ideas, and there are billions of dollars on the table. But enough has changed to make the outcome of this second trial unguessable.
Apple and Samsung are headed back to court today for round two of their billion dollar patent lawsuit that will see the two companies pointing fingers and slamming down arguments on who copied whose patents.
We’ve seen enough evidence to have our own opinion on Samsung’s copying ways and now thanks to this Thai cartoon it all becomes perfectly clear why Samsung just can’t help itself.
Samsung is back at it with a new ad that makes fun of the iPad. But this time the Korean company decided to go after all of its competition in one fell swoop; the Microsoft Surface and Amazon Kindle are also called out.
The whole ad consists of the same recycled arguments (you can’t do two things at once on an iPad, etc.), and there’s the usual flair of weirdness Samsung seems to be so fond of in its TV spots. My favorite exchange:
“So, your Samsung looks better than my iPad because it has got more pixels.”
“Right.”
“But mine has got the Retina thingy.”
Here’s a simple math question for you. How much more free space should a 16GB Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone have than an 8GB iPhone 5c?
If you said twice as much, wrong. That’s not Samsung math! Because in reality, an 8GB iPhone 5c has just 3.16 GB less usable storage than a flagship 16GB Galaxy S5.
Samsung’s NX Mini camera uses a one-inch sensor – like that inside the Nikon 1 series – only it comes in way cheaper, at $450 or $550, depending on which lens you choose. Other than that , the best description is probably “a lanes and a flip screen, and not much else.”
“My phone just erased everything it had in it and rebooted,” NBA superstar LeBron James tweeted earlier today. “One of the sickest feelings I’ve ever had in my life!!!”
Hey, that does sound frustrating. Who can blame him for tweeting his frustration with his Galaxy Note phablet?
There was only one problem.
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When you buy a 16GB iPhone 5c, you get 12.60GB of storage space left over after taking into account iOS 7’s default install size. Comparatively, the Samsung Galaxy S4 was the worst bang for the buck, storage-wise, in smartphones: a paltry 8.56GB of internal space was available to the user to store apps and media upon.
Even the S4, though, was roomy compared to the newly announced Galaxy S5. A 16GB Galaxy S5 comes with less than eight gigabytes of usable memory.
Samsung just revealed its latest flagship smartphone the Galaxy S5 and not only is it waterproof, it comes in four colors – black, white, blue and gold.
Apple announced the gold iPhone 5s last Fall which led to Samsung to respond up with a limited gold S4 edition, but now it plans to sell the gold S5 globally starting in April.
The gold iPhone 5s was a huge hit with consumers with demand far outpacing supply. We’ll have to wait till Spring to see if the gold S5 inspires a similar fervor with fans, but so far it’s drawing more comparisons to a band-aid than an Apple product.
The Galaxy S5 Gold, or what I call the Galaxy S5 Band-Aid pic.twitter.com/xU5fzvWrvz
— Joanna Stern (@JoannaStern) February 24, 2014
Image: BI
Phil Schiller and possibly Scott Forstall are expected to make witness appearances for the next round of the Apple v. Samsung trial, when the two companies return to court in California in late March.
As Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Schiller was the highest-profile witness to take the stand during the first jury trial in the patent case between Apple and Samsung in August 2012.
Samsung is trying to weasel out of paying up to Apple, asking Judge Lucy Koh for a mistrial based upon the supposedly “racist” remarks of Cupertino’s attorneys. But Judge Lucy Koh was having none of it.
Getting Apple to dish on secrets is practically impossible, but if you’re looking for an inside line to one of the most powerful CEOs in tech, the house next door to Tim Cook just went on the market.
That’s right, even you could become Tim Cook’s neighbor, as long as you got a cool $2.8 million in the bank to drop on a condo.