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Apple vs. the world: A brief history of failed Apple bashing

Published Sep 16th, 2014 12:12PM EDT
Apple Vs The World

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If there’s one thing Apple’s rivals love to do, it’s bash Apple in marketing and advertisements. Of course, as we’ve seen time and time again, this often doesn’t work out very well for Apple’s rivals. In recent history, Samsung is the only company that has managed to build an Apple-bashing campaign into real commercial success, and it literally took tens of billions of dollars worth of marketing and advertising campaigns to make it happen.

Unfortunately for most of Apple’s rivals, they don’t have tens of billions of dollars to back up their anti-Apple ads.

With Paypal having recently used “Nudegate” — the recent scandal in which hundreds of nude celebrity photos were leaked due to iCloud breaches — as an opportunity to take a shot at Apple, “veteran design and management surgeon” and well-known Apple pundit Kontra took the opportunity to look back very briefly at a couple other campaigns that took similar swipes at Apple.

Included in the post are RealNetworks’ poke at the iPod in 2004 that focused on iTunes DRM (remember RealNetworks?) and Nokia’s 2007 claim that “phones should be open to anything” (after failing to react to the iPhone, Nokia collapsed and now it doesn’t even make phones anymore).

Will Paypal suffer a similar fate? Only time will tell. In the meantime, reminisce with us and check out the old anti-Apple ads by clicking through to Kontra’s blog post, which is linked below in the source section.

Zach Epstein
Zach Epstein Executive Editor

Zach Epstein has been the Executive Editor at BGR for more than 10 years. He manages BGR’s editorial team and ensures that best practices are adhered to. He also oversees the Ecommerce team and directs the daily flow of all content. Zach first joined BGR in 2007 as a Staff Writer covering business, technology, and entertainment.

His work has been quoted by countless top news organizations, and he was recently named one of the world's top 10 “power mobile influencers” by Forbes. Prior to BGR, Zach worked as an executive in marketing and business development with two private telcos.