Samsung may be ordered by a U.S. court this week to pay Apple anything between $28 million and $1 billion at the culmination of a lengthy case that found the Korean company to have infringed various Apple patents linked to the iPhone.
Whether the misdemeanors ever caused any red faces at Samsung isn’t clear, but it certainly hasn’t stopped the company from ripping into its rival periodically over the years, targeting the iPhone in a series of ads that aim to promote its own Galaxy handsets.
The most recent effort landed on YouTube a couple of days ago, though the content of the ad is bound to leave some scratching their head in confusion.
The latest in its “Moving On” series, where Samsung hopes to persuade iPhone users to ditch their handset in favor of one of its own, shows a woman becoming frustrated with her Apple-made handset while traveling.
Samsung features its flagship Galaxy S9 phone in the ad, but, rather oddly, puts it alongside the iPhone 6, a phone that Apple launched in 2014. Yes, that’s four years ago.
OK, it soon becomes clear that Samsung wants to highlight the frustrations of battery throttling, a system Apple secretly built into many of its phones that slows performance when the battery ages, in order to prevent sudden crashes. Apple apologized to its customers after the system was uncovered at the end of last year, and offered to replace iPhone batteries at less than half the usual price. On top of that, a recent iOS update included a performance management feature that lets iPhone owners turn off battery throttling.
In Samsung’s ad, the woman’s slow iPhone 6 keeps letting her down, prompting her to visit an Apple Store. The helpful assistant tells her she can turn off the performance management feature to speed things up, but that it may lead to unexpected shutdowns. “Or you can just upgrade it,” he adds, though a new $29 battery for her current phone would also help.
Remembering a guy she saw earlier on the plane with a smug look on his face as he played on his shiny new Galaxy S9, she opts for, you guessed it, the Galaxy S9. And in the ad’s final shot, she looks really happy for it.
We get that Samsung wanted to target the hassle caused by battery throttling rather attack the iPhone 6, but a different kind of ad would’ve compared the Galaxy S9 to its more obvious rival, the iPhone X. If you’re currently trying to decide between the two, then be sure to check out Digital Trends’ informative comparison guide to help you make the right choice.
