The world’s leading smartphone makers just can’t stop copying each other. While the company has certainly improved its image over the past few years, Samsung is likely most famous for being an Apple copycat. After all, the company was sued repeatedly by Apple for stealing its technology and designs. And as we all learned, things got so crazy at one point that Samsung even created a 132-page internal document to help its engineers copy the iPhone pixel by pixel. Of course, Apple is hardly innocent in all this. The iPhone maker has aped plenty of features from Android in recent years, and it probably never would have made iPhones with large displays if Samsung hadn’t paved the way.
But now, things have gone way too far…
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So what’s the latest feature Apple ripped off from its top smartphone rival Samsung? Apparently, Apple was jealous that Samsung’s exploding Galaxy Note 7 is stealing some of the iPhone 7’s airtime, so it built an exploding smartphone of its own.
All joking aside — and before other sites catch wind of this story and go crazy with it — this clearly appears to be an isolated incident, at least for the time being.
The image above was posted by Reddit user “kroopthesnoop” on Wednesday, and it shows a matte black iPhone 7 Plus that certainly looks like it exploded. Unlike Samsung’s somewhat widespread Galaxy Note 7 problem that was due to a battery defect, however, this iPhone exploded while in transit, according to the phone’s owner. When he received the iPhone he ordered and took it out of the box, this is what he found.
Details are scarce for the time being. “Something happened between the factory and delivery,” is all the phone’s owner had to say in his thread on Reddit. Apple hasn’t commented publicly and neither has UPS, but one or both companies will likely have to investigate the matter when the phone’s owner contacts Apple for a replacement.
UPDATE: Photos removed at owner’s request. You can view them here and here.
Headline updated following additional photos posted by the Reddit user, which appear to show that the package suffered some sort of trauma while in transit.
