“Samsung was such an annoyance for us at Apple, that they were stealing our technology and copying our innovation in shoddy versions with bigger screens.. We weren’t happy with that!”
This was the answer of Apple Vice President, Greg Josuyak, when he was asked in a documentary film published in the Wall Street Journal, about his opinion of the competition that the American company faced with the beginning of the emergence of smartphones, but what is the truth of this statement, and did the Korean company rise thanks to Apple’s innovations already?
Apple vs. Samsung .. In the world of smart phones, and before the spread of Chinese phones and their emergence now, there was no doubt that Apple and Samsung dominated this market; They plowed it lengthwise and crosswise, giving no opportunity for any competitor to share the cake with them. It started with the first iPhone phones , which was released in 2007, and since that time, the competition between Americans and Koreans has flared up, so each company has tried to eliminate the other, which led to entering into an economic and political battle that reached international courts!
Despite the partnerships and interests that were – and still are – between the two companies, this did not prevent one of them from accusing the other of stealing its patents, and this accusation is what resulted in what Vanity Fair described as the great war of phones that continued for many years in international courts as well as We mentioned, and the reason lies in the mutual accusations of theft and the desire of each party to monopolize control of the market, so how did this conflict begin, and who stole from whom?
The first Apple phones and the beginning of the mobile revolution
January 9, 2007 was a special and timeless date for Apple; On that day, the Macworld conference took place and Steve Jobs came out in his blue jeans and classic black T-shirt to present us with a premature technological masterpiece. With a touch screen, a camera of ahead of its time, and many other features, the first iPhone in history was introduced!
Although it wasn’t the first device in history to come with a touch screen, as IBM released a touch screen device called the “IBM Simon” in the 1990s, the iPhone was unlike anything consumers had experienced before. The idea of giving up buttons was somewhat silly to many, and even companies thought it was a silly move; It is difficult for the masses to get used to this sudden change!
Indeed, the device was not a huge success at first, and sales that made other giants laugh at the time; With Nokia making hundreds of millions in profits, the first Apple device didn’t rise to anything. The phones of the giant companies were achieving millions of sales since the first month, while the first iPhone phone needed about two and a half months to sell only one million copies, and by the end of 2007 (the year in which the device was released), phone sales did not exceed one and a half million copies, but did not achieve this. Basically the number. (If we compare Apple with competitors at the time, we find that Samsung in the same year achieved sales of an estimated 1.5 million, while Nokia exceeded 400 million dollars!)
Samsung is the main hero behind the success of the iPhone!
iPhone sales remained modest and did not predict any danger to competitors until late 2008. At that time, sales began to rise little by little and competitors began to sense the danger. Everyone turned to this valuable phone, which makes its owner feel distinguished and proud; This is because it already was. No phone was made in the market to compete with the iPhone yet, and everyone started looking to buy it, to the point where Apple itself couldn’t keep up with the skyrocketing sales, and the phone was often out of the market.
The strange thing is that all this success would not have happened without Samsung, yes my dear, Apple’s direct competitor and archenemy, which – if you didn’t know – was making processors for iPhones, and is the main supplier of the current OLED screens for phonesCamelEven today.
About a year before the first iPhone was due to be released, the most important piece of any phone – the processor – wasn’t ready yet. This led to great tension within Apple, and forced them to rush to Samsung, which was manufacturing the iPod electronic chips, and within only 6 weeks, the miracle occurred and the “Prototype” prototype, which usually takes months, was prepared from the iPhone processors (Samsung). 32-bit RISC ARM), and this in turn led to the release of the iPhone on time, achieving the successes we talked about.
Apple vs. Samsung: The Beginning of the Conflict
When Samsung released its first smartphone in 2010, which was the first of the “S” series, Steve Jobs was furious, and Walter Isaacson (author of Steve Jobs) said he wanted to start a “thermonuclear” war on the Android system that Samsung relied on in its devices . Jobs believed that the 2009 Samsung Galaxy phone and its Android operating system were a copycat of Apple’s innovations, so he saw no other choice but to sue Samsung immediately.
In fact, Steve Jobs had the right to view it as public theft, because he laid the foundations for using a smartphone, such as the ability to swipe on the screen, the idea of a keyboard that supports automatic correction, and the gestures we use until today to zoom in and out all first appeared on Steve’s phone Jobs first!
But before resorting to the courts and the judiciary, and on the basis of “live and salt” between the two companies, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook (current Apple CEO) offered Samsung President Ji Lee a settlement that required Samsung to pay $30 on each smartphone sold, and $40 On every tablet in order to enjoy Apple’s patents, but the South Korean giant did not agree.
“We’ve been making mobile phones since antiquity, we have our own patents, and some of them may be infringed by Apple.”
Samsung President Jay Y. Lee responded to Steve Jobs’ accusations of stealing his innovations.
Hence the war fuse between Apple against Samsung, and in 2011, the war began, and the company raisedCamelIn April of that year, several cases in several countries against Samsung, accusing the Korean company of stealing the iPhone design, violating a number of patents related to touch screens, and designing the interface of the system, and the company demanded $ 2.5 billion in compensation for the profits that it would makeCamelWere it not for the presence of Samsung devices that stole their innovations and ideas. Of course, Samsung returned from afar, and it also raised several cases in the United States, South Korea, Germany, Britain, and other countries on theCamelShe argued that the latter had stolen its communications and data transmission technologies.
Apple won the case, and the court awarded it about one billion and fifty million dollars, but Samsung appealed the ruling and the cat-and-mouse struggle continued; Sometimes it was in the interest of the cuffCamelAt other times, it is in the interest of Samsung.CamelSamsung is accused of stealing from her, and Samsung is accusedCamelTheft of patents related to wireless networks, and even the design of the iPhone was originally stolen from Sony!
These issues continued for many years, and were classified as one of the most closely related issues in the technical field, but with time the technologies that the two companies disputed became prevalent among everyone, which made Apple change its goals from trying to ban the sale of Samsung phones from the market, to collecting it for the largest amount of compensation. possible from Samsung.
Apple vs Samsung: Peace is good
After a war of technological attrition that lasted for about 7 years, both sides knew that there was no other loser. In June 2018, Chinese companies were shaking the market with their new devices, and consumers no longer flock to Samsung and Apple, who knew that the conflict was pointless, and that the only beneficiary of these issues were the competing companies. Indeed, both of them reached a settlement whose details were not announced, and now nothing new or old is returned and everything is fine between the two companies, or at least this is what is announced.
Analysts found that Apple could make more money if it walked away from the courts and its bloody battle with Samsung and focused on introducing new competing products, and although Apple managed to win the most cases, it failed to restrain its Korean competitor from the market.
It is true that Samsung is no longer the main manufacturer of Apple processors, which is now the Taiwanese company TSMC, but we must not forget the size of the partnership represented in the manufacture of OLED screens and other common interests between the two companies.
Apple vs. Samsung: Did Samsung Steal Identity?Camel?
The question here is limited to the things that matter to us as users; Such as icons and visible designs, and this is because it is easy to know or notice the similarity and comparison between the two companies’ devices. On the design point, we can say that Samsung quoted the original iPhone design, and designed its phone, which was released in 2009, and this was not only the starting point, but the Korean company continued to quote from its counterpart until the emergence of the fashion of the back of the glass phone that Apple started pioneering with the iPhone 6s To find it later on the Samsung Galaxy S6, if you put the two phones next to each other, you may not be able to tell them apart!
Also, Samsung can be accused of quoting the shape of the icons, at least this is what angered Steve Jobs at the time, in addition to the features that Apple provided in its operating system, which Samsung later tried to imitate, such as the Siri voice assistant and its competitor “S Voice” from Samsung, and even the general idea In the way the user interface is designed in the operating system, and divided into separate applications that are exited by the home button, we can attribute it to the first iPhone.
Steve Jobs’ real battle was with Android, not Samsung
Documenting his autobiography, Steve Jobs stated that he wanted to destroy Android, that he was willing to spend all of Apple’s money and even his last breath if that was what it took to do so, that Android was nothing but a “stolen product”, and that he would sue more than one smartphone manufacturer that uses This system, including the phrase Samsung of course!
In fact, the relationship between Google and Apple was good at first, and the search giant was an important factor in the success of the first iPhone, as Google products such as Maps and the search engine were introduced on the first version of iOS. But relations between the two companies began to deteriorate when Google decided to launch the first version of its famous Android system, in November 2007, 10 months after the launch of the first iPhone.
Hence, enmity began to arise between the two companies, as Steve Jobs saw that Android is nothing but a copycat of iOS and that the similarity between the two systems could not be purely a coincidence. Apple’s blow to Google came a few years later when it refused a number of Google apps from its Play Store. Then I started filing lawsuits, as Steve Jobs promised, and the first victim was Motorola, and then Samsung won the largest share of other cases against Apple.
Do you know?
Samsung has been banned from selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and Germany due to a combination of patent infringement and “look and feel” similarities with iPads.
This does not mean that Apple is innocent. We can accuse Apple of quoting the “S pen” stylus that Samsung was known for in the Galaxy Note series, and came out to its fans with its famous Apple Pencil for iPad devices. Also, the Qi wireless charging standard, which first appeared with Samsung phones, specifically the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge in 2015, and then we saw it in the iPhone 8 in 2017.
The witness here is that what is hidden is greater, and that these quotes may not necessarily be theft, but we rule by precedence, and what can be quoted, and what is most important for us – and for companies before us – to be distinguished from others to be able to compete and be unique in this intense technological battle, may be Samsung borrowed some features from Apple, but the Koreans were later able to form their own identity!
