Last year, Samsung turned up the heat on top competitor Apple when it launched an ad spot titled “Growing Up” that effectively threw shade at every generation of the iPhone. It followed around a young man, who had been a diligent iPhone user since the device’s first arrival, and tugs on all the imperfections that have plagued iPhone users over the years: storage space issues, the problem with sending pictures through text in the earlier days, its lack of water-resistant protection before newer models were introduced, etc.
Eventually our subject switches over to a Samsung Galaxy device and in their newest campaign, Samsung is effectively delivering on the same message, this time calling on the task of “Moving On.” In the new clip, our antagonist is a woman whose iPhone 6 consistently delivers on performance issues, lagging at critical moments with the pressure to upgrade constantly around her.
She takes it to the Genius Bar where the attendant suggests that she either turn off the performance management setting or just upgrade. She leaves the store with no new iPhone, but by the end of the clip she has upgraded to a new Samsung device while Chyvonne Scott’s 1961 track “I’m Moving On” fittingly plays on in the backdrop.
At the end of last year, Apple came under fire when it confirmed that it had been slowing down older iPhones through that performance management setting in order to preserve battery life. But, the Internet gave birth to plenty of theories, including the idea that Apple was slowing down these devices to instead get their customers to buy newer models and continue the cycle. Apple put out a statement shunning the idea, but the conspiracy remains.