Samsung has been caught deleting an ad that makes fun of Apple for not including a charging brick with the iPhone 12 — the same thing it’s rumored to be doing with its Galaxy S21 phones. The Facebook post was made by Samsung Caribbean back in October, and it had a picture of a charging brick with the caption “Included with your Galaxy” (via 9to5Google).
This isn’t the first time Samsung has deleted ads after adopting the same practice it previously mocked Apple for. Back when the Galaxy Note 10 launched without a headphone jack, Samsung deleted ads making fun of the iPhone X for not having a similar plug (ads that were made even more awkward by the fact that the iPhone in the ad was just referred to as the “ten”).
None of this is to say that doing the same thing as Apple is necessarily a bad thing. Samsung had an explanation as to why it removed the headphone jack, and not including the charger could very well be good for the environment. It’s just not a great look when Samsung is posting ads about including a charger only a few months before it’s expected to remove it.
Despite the awkwardness that the marketing could cause, Samsung could handle this better than Apple did. When Apple removed the charging brick, they also changed the cable that came with the phone: almost every previous iPhone came with a USB-A brick, and the cable included in the iPhone 12’s box was USB-C to Lightning. So the argument of “everyone has a charging brick” fell flat because almost any previous iPhone bricks weren’t compatible with the included cable (though Apple would happily sell customers one for $20).
Samsung’s phones, however, use standard USB-C cables for charging, as opposed to Apple’s proprietary Lighting. This means that the cable that comes with Samsung’s new phone will work with the charging brick that came with last year’s model (though it won’t help people who don’t buy new phones every year, as the Galaxy S10 from two years ago came with a USB-A charging brick).
