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Samsung apologizes for the Note 7 again with a ridiculous hype reel for the Note 8

Samsung apologizes for the Note 7 again with a ridiculous hype reel for the Note 8

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Before Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 8 during its event in New York City today, it first addressed last year’s Note 7 battery mishap. This is not new. Samsung has spent the last year issuing conciliatory statements about its phone that repeatedly caught fire, as well as how poorly it acted in response to those failures. But this time around, the company opted for an uplifting tone, starting the whole event off with a sugary reel of supportive words from Note fans.

Opening the event this way was a sign that, in a post-Galaxy S8 world, Samsung feels comfortable enough to drop the apologetic tone. It was also a fairly shrewd marketing move. Note fans are a core group of customers that has always been important to Samsung since the product’s earliest days. “Even when we disappointed you, you stuck with us,” the company stated in the onstage video, in between messages that Samsung plucked from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

DJ Koh, the president of Samsung Mobile, followed the video up with an appeal of his own. He said that “none of us will ever forget what happened last year,” and that he was “deeply, deeply humbled” by the Note fans’ loyalty.

He’s certainly not wrong about that. In fact, one of the videos that Samsung played was from a YouTube user who said “I’m not going to downgrade my phone” despite numerous warnings against that course of action from the company. It’s one of 10 videos that the user has uploaded to YouTube proclaiming his faith to the faulty phone.