Samsung spent years trolling Apple in commercials. Now it's cloning an iPhone feature it mocked and has deleted the ads.
- Samsung has a long and illustrious history of trolling Apple in its smartphone commercials.
- In 2017, it famously poked fun at Apple for ditching the headphone jack when it released the iPhone 7.
- Now Samsung's new phone, the Note 10, has also removed the headphone jack.
- As for that 2017 commercial, it has quietly disappeared from some of Samsung's major YouTube channels.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Samsung has a long and illustrious history of trolling Apple in its smartphone commercials. But now the South Korean firm is cloning one of the iPhone features it once mocked, and has quietly deleted records of the ads.
Samsung unveiled its Note 10 on Wednesday and, as has been widely observed, the phone falls in line with other new devices on the market in that it does not come with a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
"It's looking more and more likely that Samsung, one of the last holdouts of the standard 3.5 mm headphone jack, is phasing out the onetime industry standard," Business Insider's Antonio Villas-Boas noted.
It represents something of a volte-face for the phone maker, which famously poked fun at Apple for ditching the headphone jack when it released the iPhone 7 in 2016.
Samsung released a memorable advert in November 2017, titled "Growing Up." It features an iPhone user through the ages becoming increasingly frustrated with the limitations of his phone. In the end, he caves and buys a Samsung Galaxy.
In one section, he ruefully inspects an adapter cable, which enables iPhone users to turn their charging portal into a 3.5 mm headphone jack.
Fast forward to 2019 and Note 10 customers may need a similar bit of kit to use wired headphones with their device. And as for that "Growing Up" advert, it has quietly disappeared from some of Samsung's major YouTube channels.
Business Insider found that the advert has been removed from the Samsung Mobile USA page, which has nearly 1.8 million subscribers. It is also not available on the main Samsung channel, which has 3.8 million followers. You can still see the Samsung Mobile USA YouTube page that hosted the advert via internet archive Way Back Machine.
A follow-up to the "Growing Up" advert, released in May 2018, has also disappeared from Samsung YouTube channels. It means blogs written about the two adverts when they were released (such as these two stories on The Verge) now feature dead YouTube embeds.
Samsung has not completely expunged the advert from its official channels, however. It is still available on some regional channels. So here, courtesy of Samsung Malaysia, is the "Growing Up" advert that trolled an iPhone feature that Samsung has now adopted: