It’s not the worst press conference mistake we’ve seen at CES this year, but Samsung revisited a classic during its keynote last night: copying Apple’s work, continuing a seemingly endless pattern of Samsung (and other companies) cloning Apple, intentionally or otherwise.
In this case, Samsung presented an icon for facial recognition that is almost indistinguishable from Apple’s Face ID icon. As iMore indicates, they’re not exactly the same — the lines all seem a bit thicker and closer together, and the corners are perhaps a touch less rounded — but we’re basically looking at Apple’s Face ID icon, which is seemingly slightly adjusted to fit in with the art on the rest of the slide.
The icon came up about 50 minutes into Samsung’s press conference — titled, for whatever reason, “Age of Experience” — while H.S. Kim, head of the company’s consumer electronics division, was talking about its investment into cybersecurity. “We’ll stay ahead by investing in identity protection and secure access to your favorite websites and mobile apps through Samsung Pass,” Kim said. The icon was up for all of 15 seconds.
This seems like it was probably a mistake on the part of whoever made this portion of the slideshow. Samsung doesn’t appear to use this icon in its software or packaging; its actual facial recognition icon appears to be an outline of a face, which looks kind of generic.
That would make for the second major error of the show. Yesterday, AMD appeared to reveal details about the upcoming Xbox Series X before admitting that it had used a fan-made render of the console and had not, in fact, shown new details about what ports the machine will include.
There’s a long history of companies borrowing, often very directly, from Apple. Samsung is the most infamous, having been involved in a pair of years-long lawsuits over claims that it had copied the iPhone’s design. More recently, the clones have largely come from Chinese brands. There was a wave of notch copycats after the iPhone X came out. Xiaomi last year almost completely ripped off Apple’s dynamic wallpaper and Memoji avatars, and Huawei and its sub-brand Honor have also taken a crack at versions of Apple’s AirPods.
Comments
This shows that Apple is still the alpha leader in the industry.
By Say Myname on 01.07.20 5:15pm
^^ Truth.
By Scape3d on 01.07.20 5:16pm
This statement is obviously inflammatory and doesn’t mean much. Yes, the icon is a copy of FaceID. I’m sure they won’t actually use it. It’s a funny "mistake" – probably not a mistake. Apple isn’t great at everything (and this is coming from an Apple fan). Let’s not go crazy in the comments people.
By nos on 01.08.20 12:00pm
It’s not even that great of an icon TBH. Mostly it just shows that Samsung is shitty and lazy.
By Ghost650 on 01.08.20 1:26pm
my guess is, the guy who worked on this (or the designer who helped) probably did an image search with keywords like "face scan recognition AI icon". Prob had no idea the icon is from Apple’s Face ID.
By Hirox. on 01.08.20 11:14pm
haha, it looks like a mistake. To me it looks like they definitely planned to use something else, but for whatever reasons, whether it was time constraints, the official Samsung logo just wasn’t ready, or maybe someone just decided to slide it in and hoping no one would really notice.
By gommerthus on 01.07.20 5:18pm
how could it possibly be a mistake? hahaha
By Jeffrees on 01.07.20 5:44pm
Easy… just like he said…
"Haha my logo isn’t ready yet. Better just use our #1 competitors’ logo as a place holder! Lol oops forgot to change it! ♂️"
/s
By ddjeff on 01.07.20 9:09pm
Could actually be Samsung’s real logo – in which case, copy.
Otherwise… it happens all the time.
You pay a marketing company to build this stuff for you. They put Apple’s icon in as a placeholder and didn’t fix it.
There are a bunch of different PC ads with Mac screens on them because the marketing guys are all running Macs.
By ahlam99 on 01.08.20 4:25am
But it’s not the same icon. As pointed out in the article, someone went through the effort to make the most minor changes to the icon so it’s technically different. It’s the equivalent of changing two words in a paragraph and calling it your own because you opened a thesaurus.
By techee44 on 01.08.20 11:14am
Maybe the designers of the slide show bought a stock icons set (those other icons look stock, I think I’ve used that heart icon myself) and it included an original icon that was very similar to one Apple uses. If those were bought from Adobe Stock, then Adobe is the one in trouble.
Or maybe…Apple got the original icon from Adobe stock ha ha…
By nerdrage on 01.08.20 12:53pm
OK Sure. There’s some minor as heck changes. Oh this edge is a little smoother, this line’s just a wee bit thicker.
But come onnn.
By gommerthus on 01.08.20 1:27pm
No that’s my point, the person I replied to said they it looks like they placed it in because of time constraints. But considering they made changes to the icon, that can’t be true. They copied it. I’m with you completely.
By techee44 on 01.08.20 5:17pm
Hey, at least now they are upfront about where they get their designs and feature ideas from.
By kalotro on 01.07.20 5:23pm
They get their designs and features from Apple? LOL do not make me laugh any more. Apple and Samsung products couldn’t be further from each other in those regards.
By TheIzzz on 01.07.20 5:59pm
The underlying tech is identical so of course the products look and behave similar. The biggest difference between Apple and Samsung is their style and marketing.
By wigby on 01.07.20 11:30pm
They’re not the only one, but this is a little more brazen than Google.
By zduboss on 01.07.20 5:29pm
Google’s is at least different. Different concept, different execution. Samsung’s was a direct rip
By FriendlyNeighborhoodPoolman on 01.07.20 5:54pm
That doesn’t look anything like Apple’s.
By KidAKidB on 01.07.20 6:20pm
Doesn’t look anything like Apple’s?
1. Why does it have it have to be a circle? Why not the oval face used in most app icons like Facebook, Apple contacts, etc.?
2. Why does it have to have a L shaped nose? Why not no nose like Emojis? Why not a sillehoute?
Point being there are so many ways to design this without defaulting to Face ID style or Happy Mac style. Read about the origins of the this icon here: https://www.cultofmac.com/502712/face-id-logo-resurrects-classic-macintosh-icon/
I image searched "face recognition icon" and there are dozens of variations that look nothing like Face Id.
By pboardman on 01.08.20 10:00am
This looks more like the smiley face stamps my primary school teachers would occasionally give me
By Drapery on 01.07.20 7:17pm
Get your eyes checked
By Jnss98b on 01.07.20 7:43pm
By kalotro on 01.07.20 5:29pm
Well to be fair, Apple didn’t have that tablet look first (HP Compaq TC1100 circa 2001)…
By TheIzzz on 01.07.20 6:10pm
We also saw the same tablet in 2001: A Space Odyssey which was released in 1968. I believe the props were also more functional than that piece of shit you reference.
By wigby on 01.07.20 11:37pm