Samsung vs Apple: Why the Galaxy Z Fold8 Ad Takes a Crack at the iPhone Duo

Samsung paid for a billboard and broke the picture.

A bright line cuts across the image. It looks like the sort of thing you hope will go away if you close the phone and open it again. Samsung Canada put it on Instagram and took the gag onto mobile billboards in Toronto and Vancouver. The line across the picture was fake. The invitation to switch to the Galaxy Z Fold8 was quite sincere.

A few days earlier, Apple had acknowledged an inner-display issue affecting what it called a small number of iPhone Duo units and directed affected customers to AppleCare for a replacement. Samsung left Apple’s name off the creative. “Folding. We know a thing or eight,” it said. By then, enough people had seen the pictures to know whose misfortune they were being invited to recognise.

I like the confidence it takes to leave a picture looking defective when you sell screens for a living. I like the nerve even more. A company making fun of somebody else’s first foldable must be reasonably sure nobody in the audience remembers its own.

Samsung found an audience outside the Apple Store

In 2011, Apple had people standing on pavements waiting to buy an iPhone. Samsung had a Galaxy S II and a good question: what if the people in the queue were the last to find out what was new?

“The Next Big Thing Is Already Here” put the waiting customers in the middle of the commercial and the Galaxy in the hands of people passing by. The iPhone line was ordinarily a fine advertisement for Apple. It told anyone walking past that a phone might be worth rearranging a day for. Samsung kept the pavement, the anticipation and the customers. Then it changed what the queue meant.

The Galaxy S III sequel in 2012 improved the insult. A man in line was already using a Galaxy. He was saving a place for his parents. The iPhone line had acquired the faint air of a family errand. At a graduation pool party the following year, Samsung moved the comparison into the backyard, where the Galaxy S4 could show off tricks such as answering a call without touching the screen.

Some of those features have aged better than others. The sharper observation was about behaviour. There is a limit to how much people care about a specification while reading a comparison chart. Let them watch somebody have an easier time taking a photo, and the difference has a chance of sticking. Put that person next to somebody who has queued for the privilege of doing it the hard way, and you have an ad.

Apple found a line in the judgment

Apple could be considerably less discreet than the record of its commercials suggests. In 2012, a UK court required it to publish an acknowledgement that the Samsung tablets at issue had not infringed the iPad’s registered design. Apple’s first website notice included the judge’s observation that the Samsung tablets were “not as cool”. It also brought up decisions elsewhere. The Court of Appeal required Apple to revise the notice.

The judge supplied the dig. Apple supplied the distribution. It takes some commitment to leave a courtroom obliged to publish something favourable about a rival and still find a way to tell readers the rival has a taste problem.

Two years later, Apple bought newspaper space for an Earth Day ad. There were solar panels in the picture and a line about ideas Apple wanted other companies to copy. Samsung went unnamed. With the companies fighting over intellectual property, the line was widely read as a swipe. The US patent dispute would run until a settlement in 2018. The UK notice concerned particular tablets and a particular registered design. It makes a marvellous scene in the rivalry; it makes a lousy shortcut to who copied what across the entire smartphone business.

Samsung’s preference was to put the objection on television and give it props. In 2014, Wall Huggers sent iPhone users looking for sockets at an airport while the Galaxy S5 could swap its battery. Screen Envy got to the iPhone 6 before the phone did, asking why anyone was waiting for a bigger screen. And when Apple’s launch livestream glitched, Samsung’s It Doesn’t Take a Genius series had actors dressed like Apple Store staff make a meal of it.

The airport remains my favourite of those three. Anybody who has sat on a terminal floor because the socket was there understands the joke before Samsung has to explain the phone.

The archive comes without a charger

By 2017, Samsung could make an entire coming-of-age film out of an iPhone habit. In Growing Up, a man spends a decade buying iPhones before moving to a Galaxy Note8. There’s a wet handset, there are adapters, and there is a man in the queue with an iPhone X notch shaved into his hairline. It’s a preposterous haircut and an excellent joke about the way a product can become part of somebody’s identity.

In 2018, Ingenius returned to the mock Apple Store. The company that prided itself on making things simple was represented by a shop employee explaining how many pieces a customer might need to charge a phone and use wired headphones at the same time. Samsung eventually dropped the headphone jack from the Galaxy Note10. Some of its earlier ads disappeared from its channels.

Then came the charging brick. Samsung’s Caribbean Facebook page ribbed Apple for leaving it out of the iPhone 12 box and later removed the post. The Galaxy S21 arrived without a charging plug. Samsung’s executives explained that gradually removing accessories could help address sustainability concerns and spare people from receiving accessories they didn’t need.

That might be a perfectly defensible argument. It would have been easier to make if somebody hadn’t already written the gag about how absurd it was for Apple to send you home without a charger. The sharper the insult, the more likely someone is to remember it when you reach the same decision. A brand can delete a post. The person who laughed can still have a screenshot.

The first Fold had a difficult opening

In April 2019, Samsung postponed the original Galaxy Fold after display problems surfaced in early review units. It investigated and announced changes, including extending the top protective layer under the bezel and reinforcing parts of the hinge area. The redesigned phone went on sale later that year and came to India in October.

This is the bit that makes the Canadian ad worth more than a chuckle. Samsung has spent years learning how to make something that closes in the middle and has to survive being treated like a phone. Its own early trouble is part of what gives the experience claim substance. It is also what makes a victory lap around somebody else’s display trouble look a little premature.

Samsung once had a much easier argument. When Apple introduced the iPhone 14 in 2022, Samsung Mobile US asked to be told when it folded. In On the Fence, an Apple user sat astride a fence while contemplating the foldables over on the Samsung side. The invitation made sense: if you wanted that kind of phone, an iPhone couldn’t give it to you.

Apple now can. The reason to cross the fence has to be better than the view from the top.

Samsung knows what to do with Apple’s wreckage

In 2024, Apple used a hydraulic press to crush musical instruments and other creative tools in an iPad Pro ad. It meant to show how much could fit into a thin device. Plenty of people saw a technology company flattening the things they loved using. Apple apologised. Samsung’s UnCrush put a musician among the debris, where she picked up a damaged guitar and played from music displayed on a Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra.

It’s a useful comparison with the Canadian work. In each case, Samsung found an image the audience already understood and gave it a different ending. The musician kept playing. The bright line turned into a prompt to switch. Samsung saved itself the work of building the whole scene from scratch. Apple and the people talking about Apple had already done a fair bit of it.

There’s a limit to that economy. An iPad ad can hand Samsung a lovely scene without handing it an iPad buyer. A cracked screen can make a Galaxy billboard worth photographing without establishing that a Galaxy will spend less time in a repair shop. Apple’s initial statement gave no failure rate. The Samsung ad supplies no comparative reliability data. Eight generations are a good reason to ask what Samsung has learned. The answer has to be more substantial than eight.

The switch is the expensive part

Both phones are sold in India. That makes the choice relevant here even though the billboard stunt was Canadian. Consider someone who has used an iPhone for years, wants a larger screen and has finally found one that folds without making them change the way they back up photos or talk to the family. Samsung is asking that person to make two decisions at once: buy a foldable and leave the iPhone. The Duo lets them make the first decision on its own.

Samsung has a credible way to make the case. Put the phones in somebody’s hands. Let them type on the outer screen, open a document and take a call. Tell them what a damaged inner display means for the repair bill and how long they might be without the phone. For a shopper spending this kind of money, those answers have more practical value than knowing which marketing department got to the punchline first.

Apple has an opening of its own. It can make the replacement process easy to understand and show buyers how it will look after the device after they leave the store. It needn’t make a billboard. A customer trying to find out what will happen to their phone has already had quite enough entertainment.

For now, Samsung has the better joke. I’d just leave a little room on the truck for the 2019 model. It put in the hard miles that made the line possible.