Our old friend Dan Lyons is back, and he’s verrry disappointed that you Apple fanboys are being mean to poor Samsung.
Enough with the Samsung bashing
So I wonder sometimes if people at Samsung resent the way Apple and its cadre of increasingly nasty fanboy bloggers…
Bzzzzt.
…keep deriding Samsung as some kind of backwater knock-off shop, a cheap Asian cloner that, as Apple put it in a lawsuit, “slavishly copied” Apple to make its products.
Surely there is no merit to any of those claims. It’s all in the fevered imaginations of “fanboy bloggers,” who have no remorse in their vicious smear campaign. Sure, Samsung is a behemoth of a company that makes products from biopharmaceuticals to life insurance, but if you prick it, does it not bleed?
No?
Oh.
The latest example is on Daring Fireball, a blog penned…
Pretty sure John Gruber doesn’t use a pen to blog.
…by John Gruber, a hardcore Apple fanboy.
As Gruber and Lyons have something of a tit-for-tat putdown contest going on, the Macalope suspects this is just Lyons being cute.
That’s great. Remember when he used to be funny?
Anyway.
Gruber and people like him really believe that Samsung just sits around making copies of Apple products. In their view, Apple is the fountain from which all creativity flows, and Samsung just follows behind, stealing their ideas.
Dan, the company used Apple icons in one of their stores. Samsung is literally stealing Apple’s ideas. You’d have to be blind not to see it.
Or willfully obtuse.
Here’s a little experiment for Lyons: Try to find a reference on a prominent Apple blog to Microsoft stealing Apple’s ideas for Windows Phone 7. You can’t, because Windows Phone 7 is truly original. Late to the market, but original.
Now, is it hyperbole to say, as Gruber did, that Jony Ive “leads the design team at the two most-profitable phone makers”? Sure. But more than hyperbole, it’s an insult to Jony Ive. Just look at some of the crappy phones Samsung sells. Frankly, Gruber should apologize.
Lyons goes on to point out that some of the phones Samsung sells don’t resemble the iPhone 4 and 4S and, therefore, Samsung could not be copying Apple. QED.
Apple has been making essentially the same phone, with the same 3.5-inch screen size, since 2007. It’s a great phone. But Samsung is making dozens of phones and experimenting with different form factors. They must find it rich to have Apple, with its one design, accusing Samsung of lacking fresh ideas.
To the Macalope’s knowledge, no one has said that. All they’ve said is that Samsung has shamelessly copied Apple’s designs, which is pretty much incontrovertible. But Lyons’s new shtick is belittling Apple fans, so what are you gonna do?
Dismissing Samsung as a bunch of thieving cloners is ridiculous and stupid, and only proves one thing: Steve is gone, but the reality distortion field lives on.
So, let’s get this straight: Apple bloggers say Samsung copies Apple and point to numerous instances of Samsung copying Apple. And Lyons’s response is “But some of their phones are not copies, so that just proves you’re all just brainwashed fanboys.”
Here’s a thought, Dan. If Samsung’s so awesome, instead of trolling Apple fans, why don’t you start a Fake Lee Kun-hee blog?
Preferably in Korean, because the Macalope doesn’t read Korean.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]