Oh, Samsung (Premium)

Samsung’s bizarre sort-of announcement about upcoming XR solutions nicely highlights everything that is wrong with this company and its products.

The news, such as it is, came at the end of yesterday’s Galaxy Unpacked event, at which Samsung announced a predictable new lineup of Galaxy S23 phones and Galaxy Book3 laptops. Basically, Samsung is partnering with Qualcomm in chipsets and Google in Android software on a coming line of what it calls XR (extended reality) products, where XR is some bouillabaisse of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). Because why not?

Samsung president TM Roh welcomed executives from Qualcomm and Google on stage, gave them both big hugs, and then allowed them to promote their wares and this weird thing called XR.

“With XR, we’re working to create a new era of highly immersive new digital experiences that blur the lines between our physical and digital worlds,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said during the segment. “With our Snapdragon XR technology, along with Samsung’s amazing products and Google experiences, we have the foundation to make this opportunity a reality and drive the future of the spatial Internet.”

So far, so good: Samsung, in keeping with its historic strategy, is partnering with the logical partners to take on Apple’s coming Reality Pro headset and (let’s call it) XR platform. This is the approach that Microsoft and the PC industry took to beat the Mac, and it’s the approach that Google and its Android partners took to (sort of) beat the iPhone. (That one is more of a gray area when you factor in profitability and overall quality.) Anyway, it makes sense.

“AR and VR is an exciting space in which Google has been investing for some time,” Google senior vice president Hiroshi Lockheimer added after an overview of his company’s partnership with Samsung. “These technologies are integral to the new phase of computing. They can change the way we interact with people and information to get things done in the real world. But delivering this next generation of experiences requires cutting-edge, advanced hardware and software. Google has been investing in AR experiences that are more immersive and fundamentally different from traditional 2D formats for quite some time. On mobile, we’ve scaled AR Core to over one billion Android devices. We’ve also brought AR to Search, YouTube, and Google Maps. And Google Lens is now being used for more than 8 billion visual searches per month. These examples are just a prelude to our long-term vision. We’re working towards a new generation of computing, enabled by immersive experiences across brand new form factors, that will further elevate what you can do with Google.”

That is … Interesting. But it’s also very vague. Indeed, Roh referred to this work as “an exciting vision” at this event because that’s all it is: Samsung didn’t have a product to announce, just an idea. And a general approach by which it will work with partners to bring whatever it is to market.

And that was it. That was literally the extent of Samsung’s XR push. (Left unsaid at the event: Samsung is also partnering on services in XR with Meta and Microsoft.)

That’s bad enough, but Roh offered a little more clarity into Samsung’s strategy in an interview with The Washington Post. And I find his explanation troubling.

“Many different companies have been making these announcements about different realities,” Roh told the publication. “So we have also been making similar preparations, no less than any others.”

Um. What?

Put through a bullshit filter, what Roh just admitted to was that the only reason Samsung is creating some kind of XR product line is because its competitors—read: Apple—are doing so first. Samsung has no other justification for doing it. It is simply copying Apple.

Now, why does that sound familiar?

Oh, right: as part of its crusade against the “stolen product” that is Android, Apple decided to take on, not Google, the platform maker, but rather Samsung, the hardware maker that was most successful in taking on its iPhone. And it did so in court in a precedent-setting case that argued that Samsung’s hardware designs were wholesale copies of the iPhone. “Samsung … has systematically copied Apple’s innovative technology and products, features, and designs, and has deluged markets with infringing devices in an effort to usurp market share from Apple,” the consumer electronics giant argued at the time.

In the end, numerous Samsung phones and other devices were found to infringe on multiple Apple patents (and, thanks to countersuits, a handful of Apple devices were likewise found to infringe on two Samsung patents). After some appeals, Apple received less than 10 percent of the damages it originally sought, but Samsung was forever branded a copycat. And Apple was able to claim, correctly, that “Samsung willfully stole our ideas and copied our products.”

And now Samsung is doing it again. Once a serial abuser, always a serial abuser. And this is the problem I’ve always had with Samsung—well, that and its insane practice of duplicating Google apps and services and spamming buyers of its devices with the resulting crapware—writ large. In the end, this company has never had an original idea. It sees what others are doing. And it copies them.

And that’s true whether they’re partners like Google or competitors like Apple.