Samsung ad pokes fun at throttled iPhone to get customers to move on to Galaxy
Apple and Samsung spent last week in a California courtroom, apparently the final stages of a patent litigation saga that has gone on for years, where a jury will decide the financial damages Samsung owes Apple for infringing on iPhone design patents.
But quite separately, Samsung is coming at Apple and the iPhone in the court of public opinion, through a new commercial that pokes fun at Apple’s revelation that it may throttle or slow down iPhones with older near-depleted batteries.
The timing of Samsung's spot is a tad curious in that Apple apologized for the battery issue back in December and said it would offer out-of-warranty replacement batteries for as little as $29. Moreover, as recently as March, Apple came out with an iOS software update that includes a performance management tool that lets you disable the throttling that Apple says it put in place to protect devices with weak batteries from sudden, unexpected crashes.
No matter. The one-minute ad follows the travails of an increasingly frustrated woman with a seriously poky iPhone 6, who after encountering TSA, riding on an airplane and getting into what appears to be an Uber, finally takes the phone to an Apple Store.
She is told there by a fake Apple employee that she could, “turn off the performance management feature but it may lead to unexpected shutdowns.” Or, he adds, “you could just upgrade it.”
Upgrading, of course, is what this commercial is all about. But since this is a Samsung ad, the message is not to buy the buy the latest iPhone—the spot also briefly shows a guy with a hairline that resembles the oft-maligned “notch” on the iPhone X--but rather to purchase Samsung's flagship Galaxy S9.
Trading in an iPhone for a Galaxy is further punctuated by the commercial's not-so-subtle soundtrack: I’m Moving On by Chyvonne Scott.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
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