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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that Samsung's before and after poster has all the screens turned off, allowing black on black designs to look edge to edge, and dismissing the look of the backlit UI, suggesting similarities far greater than they were at the time.

The argument isn't about the devices on that poster. It's about Samsung's a posteriori "design" and marketing process. Their product guy's "can't design patent a black rectangle" comments are a bit disingenuous:

http://copyrightcommerceandculture.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

Also worth noting their tablet PR screenshots, like their boxes, have stopped using the iPad's portrait icon array and started featuring landscape TouchWiz widgets instead.

They were fully aware of what they were doing:

Boxes before: http://www.thegalaxytab.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/galax...

Boxes after: http://forums.appleinsider.com/content/type/61/id/9172/width...

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So what?

When I go to a clothing store, all the jeans and dress shirts and folded the same way and look nearly identical, same goes for the milk and eggs at the grocery store.

In spite of all this I always manage to come home with the brand I set out to buy in the first place.

> In spite of all this I always manage to come home with the brand I set out to buy in the first place.

Jeans are somewhat less complex. There are fewer ways to differentiate, so those differentiators become more signficant. And the makers try to differentiate across as many of them as they can.

Meanwhile, Samsung's own market feedback shows customers were coming home with the wrong box:

http://www.bgr.com/2012/07/27/samsung-tablet-returns-best-bu...

EDIT (ADDED): If you think this is "customer stupidity", you haven't been paying much attention to normals' interactions with technology, or to Samsung's deliberate packaging and presentation.

See the "What did you do with my Facebook?" incident:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_google_failed_inter...

Recapped here, "These are your users, read and be horrified":

http://uxmag.com/articles/these-are-your-users-read-and-be-h...

The suggestion that someone who isn't extraordinarily stupid could actually end up purchasing a non-iPad tablet because they couldn't tell the difference is also disingenuous.

In both images, the boxes clearly state in large lettering "Samsung Galaxy Tab."

Maybe some people are illiterate. ;-) Though more likely, they probably noticed the difference but the packaging and the images looked so much like the iPad that they thought it'd be the same. Only to realise when they opened it, that it wasn't the same.

Sorry, I still think it's customer stupidity. If you can't read "Samsung Galaxy Tab" printed on the box before shelling out a few hundred dollars, then I consider you stupid. Maybe we have different standards for what constitutes intelligence then.

A single, unqualified anecdote out of a few million Galaxy Tab and millions of iPads sold, how damming. The ideas that this is a significant, widespread problem yet hinges on a single, solitary scrap of "evidence" are almost completely incompatible.

Also, like I related above, I'm a normal with regard to clothes and food, not a fashionista or a chef yet I have no problem distinguishing between any number of all but identical products.

Stop grasping.

> A single, unqualified anecdote out of a few million Galaxy Tab

That was not a single anecdote, that was a rollup of return reasons. Quoting Samsung's own document:

"The most common pattern is that a customer returns the product which was purchased because the customer thought it was an Apple iPad 2."

Also, places like BestBuy often display things out of the box, and parents often buy the things their kids showed them.

Consider:

"Mom, buy me this," showing Mom an iPad.

Mom gets to the store, and sees these on display:

http://cdn.redmondpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/default...

Mom buys the one on the right. If you really think that confusion is so far fetched, you are not the typical Best Buy customer.

As this article[1] says, "There’s little doubt those of us familiar with techie gadgets aren’t going to mistake a Galaxy Tab for an iPad, it’s of little surprise plenty of customers have been fooled, and although Samsung claims to have shipped many millions of units of the slate, it’s currently unknown just how many of those were sold."

1. http://www.redmondpie.com/best-buy-galaxy-tab-buyers-thought...

Hold on there. Do we have the full context for the Best Buy quote?

Just because it was the most common reason for a return doesn't tell us how significant it was. What was the overall return rate? Of the devices returned, what fraction cited confusion with an iPad? Depending on the range of possible return reasons that might be large or small.

Beyond that, there's the question of how many customers are telling the truth why they're returning something. Plenty of people don't, for all sorts of reasons. Especially if they'd had any exposure to Apple's lawsuits, I'd expect the easiest way to return a Galaxy Tab would be to say "I thought it was an iPad", even if you had known the difference and just decided to spend the money on something else or whatever. Sadly, we can't figure that out from Best Buy's data, but is a possibility worth noting.

>Just because it was the most common reason for a return doesn't tell us how significant it was. What was the overall return rate?

Big. It was a huge fiasco at the time.

Links?

For a "huge fiasco" there's a distinct lack of coverage (that didn't occur in the last week as a direct result of the discovery in this case) to be found via Google.

That's like when I go shopping for toy guns, and accidentally buy a real bazooka. Whoops!

You end up with a much more powerful product? ;)

But it's single shot only and differs in handling qualities.

Yeah, but more importantly, I would imagine that jeans and dress shirts are not under any sort of patent protection, at least not anymore.

It extends to all clothing, and I think it should extend to the outer appearance of devices like phones as well. Johanna Blakley [1] made the astute point that in the fashion world, because it's legal to copy each other, the way the industry adapted was to make garments harder to mass-produce through intricate design and by using high grade materials.

Apple has already done this with the iPhone 4/4s - namely the antenna array composed of segments of high tensile stainless steel that can only be machined with very expensive, very limited availability hardware.

Apple already understands how to beat the copycats, they simply want to spite Samsung/Google.

Another point is that copying is good for Apple. Johanna Blakley again makes an excellent point: "One of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying is the establishment of trends." Apple needs the copycats in order to drive smartphone adoption, with Apple remaining the top tier innovator akin to high-end fashion labels.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashio...

So if someone's making knock-off Levi's jeans you're cool with that?

Where's the Samsung phone that says "iPhone" on it? Wranglers aren't knock off Levi's by anyone's imagination.

Hong Kong is famous for having products that look almost exactly the same but have names like "Levvis" or "Levy's" so that they can claim, no, they're not knock-offs and pretend to be surprised anyone could be confused.

Samsung was dangerously close to the line.

Yep, because "Samsung" and "Apple" is dangerously close to "Levy's" and "Levi's".

You say you only buy Levi's? All other jeans are knockoffs?

It's also interesting that images on the poster are front on so that feature details such as sliding keyboards and flip keypads are usefully omitted. With names like Slider and Flipper it almost gives the game away.

It's not just the boxes either. See the cabling and power adaptor.

http://cydiahelp.com/samsung-copies-apple/

I can excuse most of those, but the big exception is the USB plug. A proprietary USB cable is an anti-feature from the consumer's point-of-view. Copying that is like copying Apple's typos.

Samsung clearly wants to interoperate with iPhone/Pod/Pad enabled docking devices by using the same usb/docking port. Accusing them for using it is like accusing laptop manufacturers for using mini-displayport.

The plug is actually not the same as the Apple plug. That plug is Apple proprietary so Samsung would have to pay Apple some serious cash if they used it. They just developed their own lookalike cable.

Then there is no point in it. What the hell Samsung?

It's almost as if when the iPhone launched the designs started to heavily converge on whatever Apple was doing, though prior to that there are some surprising similarities.

This whole trial has been enormously educational. Stuff like this rarely sees the light of day.

> It's almost as if when the iPhone launched the designs started to heavily converge on whatever Apple was doing

Absolutely. And now they're diverging again. But it took courts to force that shift.

Its a poster designed for PR purposes, of course it is designed to convey certain facts and hide others. A couple of other things I noticed:

- the 'before' shows more in the iphone-like category and less in the other category of phones than the 'after'. Also the iphone-like cateogy has heaps of phones compared to other categories. This plays with your sense of weighting and importance because automatically you assume that you can compare numbers of phones on this chart, which you can't (mostly because iphone-like pre-iphone devices are all prototypes, whilst others are just a fraction of produced phones.)

- many of the 'before' phones in the iphone-like category are '2006', probably after Samsung would have known what apple is producing.

The most striking thing is that before the iPad 2 was released Samsung was planing to release the tab 10.1. When the new design was revealed of the iPad 2, they did a redesign of the tab 10.1. The old version was already produced and sold as the 10.1v. The new 10.1 design is strikingly similar to the iPad2.

that being said apart from the package printing the rest of the package design is not apples design or idea, I think the benefon Q had a similar set up, (first thing you see it the phone).

10.1v http://www.techspot.com/images/products/tablets/org/96609971... 10.1 http://cdn.androidcommunity.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/g...

disclosure: I own a 10.1v

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