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Apple executive says Samsung ‘ripped off’ iPhone with ‘poor copy’

Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak has claimed that an “annoying” Samsung “ripped off” his company’s technology to produce a “poor copy” of the iPhone back in the early days of the smartphone industry.

Things have gone relatively quiet on the Apple vs Samsung front of late. It used to be that the iPhone maker would routinely take shots at its upstart rival for infringing on its IP, even going so far as to sue the company in 2011.

These days the two companies generally get along reasonably well, with the South Korean giant producing some of the iPhone’s key components. It seems some wounds refuse to heal, however.

Talking to The Wall Street Journal for a new documentary marking the iPhone’s 15th anniversary, Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak has issued the kind of stinging slap that might make you check whether you’ve somehow jumped a decade back in time.

The comments come from a section of the documentary focusing on the time when Android manufacturers, led by Samsung, were producing phones with significantly larger displays than their iPhone counterparts.

“They were annoying because, as you know, they ripped off our technology,” said Joswiak. “They took the innovations that we had created and created a poor copy of it, and just put a bigger screen around it. So, yeah, we were none too pleased.”

Apple would, of course, belatedly follow the Samsung lead and bump up the size of the iPhone display. These days the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro Max have screens that are broadly equivalent to their Android counterparts.

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