Look, we’ve said this a million times before and the odds are fairly good that we’ll say it a million more times: Samsung loves to copy Apple. The two companies battled in court for years because of it. Not that we needed any proof beyond what we can see with our own eyes, those court battles uncovered a number of internal documents that showed the great lengths Samsung went to in its efforts to copy Apple. Remember the top-secret 132-page manual that explained how Samsung set out to copy Apple’s iPhone pixel by pixel? Of course you do.
Samsung continues to take inspiration from Apple’s products to this day (that Jet Black Galaxy S8 sure is pretty), and it’s no mystery why. Apple copies things from other companies as well, but it’s still the top trend-setter in the consumer electronics industry. Of course, people tend to get carried away with their accusations that Samsung is copying Apple, and such is the case right now with the company’s just-announced Galaxy S8+.
Last week, popular Apple blogger John Gruber posted a quick note on Daring Fireball about a Galaxy S8 leak.
“Looks like Samsung is beating Apple to the ‘hardly any chin or forehead’ punch,” Gruber wrote. “The top and bottom have bezels, but they’re so small Samsung couldn’t print their ugly logo on the front, finally moving past one of the worst aspects of every other Samsung phone to date.”
Fair enough. But it was the last line of his post that made me raise an eyebrow: “Are they really going to call the bigger model the ‘Plus’? They’re really going to rip off Apple’s naming?”
Hmm.
I have seen similar comments made by a number of Apple bloggers over the course of the past few weeks, and also by Apple fans on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s obviously true that Apple differentiates its larger flagship iPhones with “Plus” branding, and the company has done so since 2014 when it debuted the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Of course, there’s just one tiny problem: Samsung had a phone named “Plus” all the way back in 2011. Last time I checked, 2011 came before 2014.
Yes, back in July 2011 Samsung released the Galaxy S Plus, a lovely little phone powered by a cutting-edge single-core 1.4GHz Qualcomm Scorpion processor. It shipped with Android 2.3.3 and it even had WiMAX support! Anyway, the point is yes, Samsung has a long history of copying Apple — but there are enough real examples of Samsung’s plagiarism out there that people shouldn’t have to make things up.
