Jonathan Morrison/YouTube
YouTuber Jonathan Morrison.
- YouTuber Jonathan Morrison posted selfies to Instagram that he said he took with a Google Pixel 2 phone in portrait mode.
- However, Morrison lied, and actually took the pictures with the new iPhone XS.
- Morrison, a tech reviewer, was demonstrating how people let their loyalty to a brand color their judgment of a new product.
- In a video explaining the stunt, Morrison encouraged his followers to get rid of their "preconceived notions."
The rivalry that exists between the devoted fans of Apple's and Google's smartphone platforms is intense and territorial. Enter Jonathan Morrison, a popular tech reviewer on YouTube, who decided it was time to teach his audience about blind loyalty to a brand.
With a little bit of trickery and misinformation, Morrison - whose channel has some 2.5 million subscribers - took on the bias of Apple and Android fans.
Morrison's scheme was pretty simple: he posted these two selfies to Instagram over the weekend, with captions explaining he was testing out portrait mode on Google's flagship Pixel 2 smartphone.
His followers took to social media to praise the Android device for its photo quality, while also using Morrison's photo as a pretext for taking jabs at Apple's newest iPhone, the iPhone XS. The iPhone XS has come under under fire, in a scandal dubbed "beautygate," for its new camera that some people thought automatically smooths out your skin in photos.
However, what consumers didn't know is that Morrison had in fact taken his Instagram selfies not with an Android phone, but with an iPhone XS. His fans had unknowingly praised a photo from the Apple-made camera they had professed to hate so much.
"So I just wanted that to be a little bit of a lesson out there: Don't let a preconceived notion or headline skew your judgment," Morrison said in a YouTube video revealing his trolling. "Because clearly, everyone who thought that was a Pixel automatically assumed it was much better than the iPhone when in fact, that was the same iPhone X Max [sic] that apparently had all the beautygate problems."
Morrison knows something about this kind of smartphone tribalism. Over the past eight years, Morrison has faced his fair share of criticism from smartphone fans who vehemently disagree with his takes and accuse him of favoritism, one way or the other.
When his recent review of the new Apple phone did not mention "beautygate" or the charging problems that other users had experienced with their new iPhone XS, followers left comments calling Morrison an "Apple shill" who was giving the tech giant "a free pass."
"The point is, bugs happen. It's not just Apple - it's Google, it's Samsung, it is most companies out there," Morrison says in his video. "The thing is though, Tesla (and other companies') problems don't get as much clicks as iPhone problems."
Besides, some have pointed out that the iPhone XS camera's "noise reduction" technology, that helps take pictures with more detail, could be responsible for the so-called "beauty mode."
"Reiterates that people are not only blinded by their hate for Apple, there's no constructive criticism," a Reddit user wrote in a popular thread in the Reddit's Apple community. "Draw your own conclusion."
See Morrison's full YouTube video, where he revealed his bait-and-switch.
We've reached out to Morrison for more insight on the prank and will update if we hear back.