There’s a report from Korean news site Aju News. Thanks to the machine translation, we get to see what’s been happening over there in the past few weeks. Spoiler alert: they’re not popping champagne bottles and the sweet whiff of freshly gathered roses doesn’t linger across the halls. Quite the opposite.
What I’m saying is that nobody is celebrating; instead, the atmosphere is chilly and bitter.
The report tells how Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong – a person known for his gentle personality who “rarely gets angry” – was angry with Samsung’s mobile division. He gave a strict order for the division to reevaluate its leadership. That doesn’t sound too good, right?
According to the report, “the chairman himself stepped in after the controversy over Apple’s design plagiarism” and, as a consequence, the internal atmosphere is currently “very bad”.
As you probably know, Samsung recently released the Galaxy Buds 3 and Buds 3 Pro, plus the Galaxy Watch 7 and the maxed-out flagship dubbed Galaxy Watch Ultra.
It’s kind of hard ignoring the big, bright, red, flashing sign that screams “APPLE!” and pops up every time you lay eyes upon the aforementioned Samsung devices.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they’re ugly or inferior.
The Buds 3 Pro, while inspired by Apple, are great on their own. I’m not alone in that, as my colleague Daniel pointed out recently:
Not only is the new edgy design of the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro a breath of fresh air in a sea of AirPods lookalikes, be they with stems instead of the bulbous Buds 2 shape, but they also offer one standout design feature, the Blade Lights. The sharp corners and silver metallic design stand in an even sharper contrast to Apple’s white, neat, and minimalistic AirPods.
However, this apparently doesn’t fly with some Samsung executives. It’s hard for me to imagine how they didn’t get to see the products prior to their unveiling: they had plenty of time to do so in recent months.
