Apple Notches Another Victory (Premium)

The notch in Apple’s iPhone X is a ridiculous and unnecessary compromise. But that hasn’t stopped the Android world from copying it en masse.

And that, folks, is my biggest issue with Android.

It’s not the instability. Not the performance issues. Not the second-class apps. And not the potential security issues. No, the problem with Android is that the companies who make these devices are too eager to copy Apple. Even when what Apple did was wrong.

In fact, the entire Android market exists solely out of a desire to copy Apple. As has been well documented, Andy Rubin and his Android team halted development of their original plans for the OS when Apple announced the iPhone. The reason? The iPhone was so much better than what they had been planning. So the resulting OS was quite different from what they had originally envisioned. Instead, it was like the iPhone.

Look, there are plenty of examples of this kind of thing. Apple stealing from Xerox Parc to make the Mac. Microsoft stealing from Apple to make Windows. It goes on and on.

I can forgive Google’s original push to copy the iPhone because they had to do it. And Google even improved on the iPhone in some ways. And it introduced the notion of choice by licensing the OS to any interested third-party.

Which, of course, is the real problem. Some of the resulting designs over the past decade have been bald-faced in their Apple envy. Samsung, infamously, was one of the worst. Its initial iPhone knock-offs were so brazen that Apple actually took them to court. And won.

Today, Samsung is the source of most innovation in the smartphone market, and as I noted recently, I’m coming around to the notion that this firm may be the only company that can overcome the inherent terribleness of Android with leading-edge design. Is all forgiven? Not quite. But great products go a long ways towards soothing past pain.

And to its credit, Samsung actually poked some fun at Apple’s design miscues during its Galaxy S9 launch event at Mobile World Congress this past week. In particular, noting that its new flagships still provided a normal headphone jack (which Apple nixed in 2016) and its innovative displays were not occluded by a notch, as is the case with the iPhone X.

I wish Samsung’s other competitors were this credible.

This past week, an alarming number of hardware makers actually introduced new smartphones with, yes, an iPhone X-like notch in the top of the display. And we’ve seen credible leaks that even highly-regarded phone makers like OnePlus are working on similar designs.

No. Stop.

It is OK to copy good ideas as long as you are honest about where those ideas came from, are respectful of the originators, and improve on that work in a meaningful way. It is not OK to copy terrible ideas. All that does is highlight your own lack of imagination and creativity. These companies—which I will not highlight here—are crossing themselves off my mental list of phone makers I will consider moving forward.

I alluded to this in a semi-joking way on Twitter yesterday, noting that we should all “agree that any Android phone maker who puts an iPhone X-like notch on their freaking devices now is just going to be collectively shunned.” But it’s not a joke, not really. These companies should be shunned. They have just exposed the fact that they are not credible hardware makers.

To leave this on a happy note, I will also point out that Samsung has apparently decided to copy Apple in another noteworthy, but positive, way. According to a report in the Korea Herald, which I discovered, sadly, via BGR, Samsung will focus on quality going forward, and not just on being first to market with new features.

“Being the first turns out to be meaningless today, and [new] our strategy is to launch something that consumers believe meaningful and valuable at a right time,” Samsung CEO Koh Dong-jin told the publication. He also noted that the firm has not yet launched what he calls “an AI speaker” for Bixby because it refuses to rush the product to market: It will do so when the quality is right.

Now that’s the kind of thinking I can get behind. And as I wrote previously, I wish Microsoft would wake up and apply this thinking to Windows 10, which is drowning in nonsense these days. What a world that would be.