Always eager to respond to Apple’s latest moves swiftly and boldly, Samsung of South Korea took to Twitter following yesterday’s iPhone 6/Apple Watch/Apple Pay press conference to share an interesting banner which uses Steve Jobs’s own words as a weapon against Apple to dismiss its decision to make bigger iPhones as long overdue.
“No one is going to buy a big phone,” reads the quote on Samsung’s snarky anti-iPhone Galaxy Note 4 banner. “Guess who surprised themselves and changed their mind,” another line reads.
The attached image is accompanied by the following message on Twitter: “Big improvements and innovation come with change – even they thought so”.
I love how Samsung’s message substitutes “Apple” with “they”. It’s not clear whether this is just a quick swipe at Apple or part of a broader anti-iPhone campaign.
For what it’s worth, the tweet links to the Galaxy Note 4 mini-site hosted at the morethanbig.com domain, which tells us we should be expecting more of the same.
“There’s more to a big screen smartphone than just all that extra real estate,” reads the message on the mini-site. In another jab at Apple, the message adds that “it’s what you do with it that matters most”.
The website invites visitors to check out Note 4’s headline new features and its AMOLED display “and see for yourself why our big screens are such a big deal”.
Apple is promoting the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus under the somewhat confusing “bigger than bigger” tagline, which Samsung counters with the #morethanbig hashtag.
For the sake of completeness, Samsung started using the hashtag before Apple took the wraps off its bigger iPhones.
But Samsung isn’t the only one spoofing Apple’s U-turn on phablets.
Taiwan-based HTC, for example, ridiculed yesterday’s event, writing on Twitter: “Bigger screen. Better performance. Elegant design. Welcome to the party #iPhone6.” The tweet is accompanied by the image of HTC’s M8 handset and a blurred iPhone 6, suggesting Apple copied HTC’s design.
Bigger screen. Better performance. Elegant design. Welcome to the party #iPhone6. pic.twitter.com/v45ZXebhbs — HTC (@htc) September 9, 2014
The message is reminiscent of Apple’s August 1981 anti-IBM newspaper advertisement released two weeks after the debut of IBM’s first personal computer, the IBM PC.
Apple opened yesterday’s press conference with another mission-statement video.
Titled “Perspective” and included below, the three-minute clip reinforces Apple’s approach to product design and its philosophy of saying a thousand no’s to a single yes.
There are a number of references to Samsung: at one point, we see a scene with the huge words “FIRST, FIRST, FIRST” written on the wall — a not-so-subtle reminder of Samsung’s status as a fast-follower.
I guess you could say that Apple brought all of this unto itself the minute they aired this iPhone 5 ‘Thumbs’ ad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O99m7lebirE
That Samsung banner is a sick burn, wouldn’t you agree?