Key Takeaways
- Samsung’s new products copy key Apple features, but that’s not a bad thing.
- Copying can promote competition that forces technology to evolve.
- That could help Apple and other tech giants break out of their current ruts.
It’s no surprise that Samsung’s latest Unpacked event in Paris contained a few products “inspired” by Apple. Samsung has been imitating Apple for well over a decade, copying key features and putting just enough of a spin on them to maintain plausible deniability. Apple might disagree on that last point, naturally — between 2011 and 2018 the two companies were embroiled in dozens of lawsuits, only to settle out of court and effectively resume the status quo.
Samsung’s latest products are more shameless than usual, however. The Galaxy Watch Ultra borrows its name and many specs from the Apple Watch Ultra, down to its orange accents and a “Quick” (read: Action) button. The Galaxy Buds 3 and Buds 3 Pro are clearly shaped like AirPods, including similar stems and charging cases. Heck, while there are fewer comparisons to be made with the Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6 versus iPhones — an Apple foldable may be years away — Samsung’s newly squared-off sides evoke the iPhone 15‘s aesthetics.
Probably to the dismay of some Apple fans, I’m okay with this. In fact, I think the consumer tech world might actually benefit from more brazen copies, not fewer.
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Adapt or die, that’s the first rule of life
Keeping up with industry advancements
That’s a lesser-known quote from Frank Herbert, the author of the Dune novels. It sounds like something a self-proclaimed “alpha” would say to sound tough, but Herbert was only trying to emphasize a basic truth — that like Paul Atreides, you either react to the conditions around you or find yourself obsolete. In the consumer electronics industry, that means offering the features people want at a price they’re willing to spend.
Both Apple and Samsung have been competent at that for the most part. They’ve kept up with industry advancements or pioneered technology themselves. If an idea proves unpopular with customers, they’re willing to abandon it. Apple, for example, eventually ditched the Touch Bars on MacBook Pros, and Samsung no longer uses “waterfall” edges on its smartphones.
In recent years, though, the pace of advancement seems to have come to a crawl. Focusing on Apple, the iPhone 15 Pro isn’t far removed from the iPhone 14 Pro, and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 sports even more marginal upgrades. There were hopes in some quarters that 2024 iPad Pro would become the Mac alternatives people have always wanted, but what we got instead were M4 chips, OLED screens, and bragging about thinness.
Part of this is owing to the growing difficulty of hardware and software improvements, but it also feels like the two companies are complacent. When you’ve got customers locked into your ecosystem and mostly satisfied with annual performance tweaks, there’s less incentive to wow them. Apple Intelligence probably wouldn’t exist without the threats of Samsung’s Galaxy AI and Google Gemini, which in turn owe their existence to OpenAI’s revolutionary ChatGPT. Absent that pressure, all we got was a stagnant Siri.
The lesson is that if we want meaningful progress, companies need the evolutionary pressure Herbert was talking about — and that’s where Samsung’s plagiarism comes back into the picture.
Can copying lead to innovation?
The Galaxy Buds 3 seem a little more than familiar
In effect, I think the Galaxy Watch Ultra and Galaxy Buds 3 are holding a mirror up to Apple, highlighting its complacency. What is it supposed to point to as a major advantage for the Apple Watch Ultra? iPhone integration isn’t automatically a selling point for someone who’s considering (or already owns) an Android phone, especially when the Samsung watch is about $150 cheaper. The Galaxy Buds 3, meanwhile, may cost more than the standard AirPods at $210, but include active noise cancelation (ANC) — a feature Apple has so far reserved for the even more expensive AirPods Pro and Max.
A functioning capitalist system would use competition to produce an ever-spiraling growth in innovation that benefits both businesses and customers.
Apple is of course due to release an Apple Watch Ultra 3 and updated AirPods by the end of the year, possibly including cheaper buds with ANC, yet the rumors point to most feature upgrades being modest. As an Apple executive, I’d be seriously re-evaluating what I could do to make my products stand out in 2025 or 2026. Assuming I didn’t already have some radical moves in my playbook, anyway.
A truly functioning capitalist system would use competition to produce an ever-spiraling growth in innovation that benefits both businesses and customers. The reality is broken — weighted in favor of corporations — but even people like Apple CEO Tim Cook must have some of that idealism left in them. Without it, I doubt we’d have the Vision Pro.
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No one gets off scot-free
Samsung could come up with more original ideas
I’m not letting Samsung off the hook, to be clear. If it had better ideas of its own, it wouldn’t need to be copying Apple to this degree. There are other companies it could be looking to for inspiration as well. Because Samsung wants to be the top dog, however, beating Apple at its own game is an obvious strategy.
Really, my argument boils down to this — it’s ridiculous to complain that one company is copying another just because you happen to like one brand’s products. Short of someone violating the law, it means the copying company is improving its product, and the one being copied is going to have to do better to stay relevant. We should encourage that in an era when smartphone makers treat running mobile games a little faster as a more worthwhile investment than things like two-day battery life.
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