What just happened? For the second time in as many weeks, Samsung has capitalized on Apple's misfortune by publicly mocking its rival. The Korean company's latest jibe takes aim at the controversial Crush ad for the iPad Pro that Apple apologized for and withdrew. Samsung's version is, of course, called UnCrush.
Apple showed off the Crush ad at its Let Loose iPad event earlier this month. The commercial showed a giant press being slowly lowered, crushing a number of musical instruments, classical sculptures, books, paints, games, cameras, and more. When it retracted, an iPad Pro was left in place of the items.
The ad was slammed on social media by pretty much everyone, including actor Hugh Grant, with many noting its tone-deaf nature at a time when fears that technology is killing human creativity and costing jobs have peaked.
It wasn't long before Apple apologized for the ad, admitting it "missed the mark." The company also wisely decided not to run it on TV.
Samsung, never slow to jump on its rival's bad press, has responded to the Apple controversy by posting a video on its X account called UnCrush.
The video shows a woman walking through the debris left by Apple's crusher, picking up a damaged but still working acoustic guitar. She starts playing, reading notes off her Galaxy Tab S9, Samsung's answer to the iPad.
At the start of the month, the official Samsung UK Instagram account jumped on the back of reports that iPhone alarms had been failing to go off, a problem believed to be related to the Attention Aware feature. Samsung posted a clip that read "Rest assured our alarms GO OFF" above the 'dachshund playing piano with hat' meme, aka the Synthesizer Dog and Keyboard Dog. The post included a message that read: "Samsung users woke up on time today."
Samsung has been poking fun at Apple for years. There was the advert deriding ten years of iPhones from 2017, which included a reference to the still-controversial notch. There was also one for the Galaxy S3 from a few years earlier, and a whole series of ads taking aim at the iPhone 12 Pro Max's cameras. Google also got in on the act with several iPhone-mocking ads last year.