Now Samsung copies Apple’s near-death experience

It’s hard to believe now but Apple was once within 90 days of going bankrupt. Samsung isn’t in as bad a way as that but it has just announced that its profits are down. A lot. Seriously, a lot. They’ve dropped 60%.

Cue lots of articles. Most go along the lines of how every technology and business advisor or expert in the world has said, suggested and sometimes demanded that Apple copy Samsung and give us cheap phones with massive screens. Apple’s ignored them all and suddenly, say the articles, is looking pretty smart.

I agree. It appeals to me as a writer, since we spend so long typing away, that Apple’s head-down working approach is paying off.

But I am frustrated. Today Samsung is deaths’-dooring and everybody understands why. (Short answer: the company leaps in quickly to copy existing hits like the iPhone and now other firms are leaping in to copy Samsung. Samsung was a ‘fast follower’ rather than the innovator everybody kept telling us and now everybody always knew that,)

It’s just that we’ve been told Android is the very best phone system in the world and it just never is when you pick the bleedin’ thing up. Quick aside? A respected, long-standing computer journalist handed me a Nexus 7 tablet one day and I agreed it was very good. The icons and the spacing of them looked a bit ugly to me but actually, I think the spacing of the icons on iPads is ugly too.

But I tried to swipe to the left and couldn’t because I was at the first screen. I can’t remember how this worked now but it had a very clear and obvious visual clue that I was at the first. I scrolled to the right, reached the end and had no visual clue. This journalist rolled his eyes and said it was because Apple ‘invented’ whatever you call that elastic-band-like thing when you reach the end of a list or a screen.

I call it crap. The designers of this Nexus couldn’t be bothered to do something at both ends of the scrolling, they just did one. Absolutely zero interest in making something useful, zero interest in having any pride in the work, just knock it out, tick the box that says there’s the elastic band like alternative, then claim it’s better than iPad. And wait for journalists to say it’s better than iPad.

If you like Android, great. Have a good time. You have far more patience than I do.

But if you like Android on Samsung, that’s now… interesting.

I have a problem with Samsung copying Apple, I have a problem with Android really, really copying iOS, I just also have a problem with articles saying that this 60% profit drop is the end of the line for Samsung.

Mind you, you know that 60% drop? It is for the quarter before the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus came out. The iPhones with the big screens that were previously an Android purview.

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