Samsung has found its confidence again. With Apple’s first foldable barely out of the box, a Samsung-sponsored Instagram video, posted last week as a paid partnership, has shown up to remind everyone that the Korean giant got to folding phones first. Subtlety was clearly not part of the brief.
The ad shows a green apple sliced in half, with the two halves struggling to fold back together, before the Galaxy Z Fold 8 glides into frame looking very pleased with itself. Samsung claims its foldable is 1.6mm thinner and 53g lighter than the iPhone Duo, then signs off with “Years ahead in Foldables.” It’s a confident line, and a revealing one. When the main boast is being first, the obvious question is why being first needs this much shouting.
The timing isn’t accidental. The iPhone Duo has drawn early reports of cracked displays, and some durability tests have raised questions about its screen and hinge. The internet, never one to pass up a suffix, has already named it “crackgate.” The inconvenient detail for Samsung’s marketing team is that nobody has shown a widespread defect. A few viral photos in launch week don’t make a recall. Folding glass is a hard engineering problem for every company in this category, and early owners of foldables across the industry have shared their broken screens online. Mocking the newcomer for something the whole segment struggles with is a choice.
The ad also picks a telling battlefield. Samsung is selling millimetres and grams, the kind of numbers that look great on a slide and rarely decide how a phone feels to use every day. Apple did what it usually does. It sat out the experimental years, let others iron out the rough edges, and then arrived with a product it was willing to stake its reputation on. Whether that pays off will depend on how the Duo holds up over months of real use, not how a piece of fruit fares in a short social clip.
None of this is new. Samsung has spent more than a decade taking shots at the iPhone, from its Ingenius and Growing Up campaigns to a recent Fold 8 spot featuring a Tim Cook lookalike. Google plays the same game with its Best Phones Forever series. Comparison ads like these tend to land hardest with fans who’ve already picked a side, and they rarely change many minds among buyers who haven’t.
If the crack reports fade, Samsung will have spent its ad budget giving the iPhone Duo free publicity.
