When Apple released the iPhone 7 in 2016, without a headphone jack, many customers were miffed that they had to use headphones designed for a lightning port or buy a dongle, and couldn’t charge their phone and use headphones at the same time.
Samsung channeled that frustration into an ad campaign. Over the last couple years, Samsung released several commercials that trolled Apple and iPhones — mocking the Genius Bar, the fan culture, screen size, battery throttling, screen notch and the lack of a headphone jack. Namely, one commercial titled “Growing Up,” released in November of 2017, captures a longtime iPhone user’s disappointment at having to use a dongle. He finally switches to Samsung and his life is all the better.
But now that fictional character has been betrayed less than two years after he switched allegiance. Samsung is also ditching the headphone jack, and scrubbing the ads that make fun of a company that would dare deprive customers of the convenience of plugging standard headphones into a mobile device.
On Thursday, Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 10. Gizmodo’s first-look review lamented the loss of the 3.5mm headphone jack — because the Galaxy Note is a phone line that was known for having all the features a user would want.
So Samsung, it seems, prefers people don’t know that it once mocked the iPhone for requiring people to buy an extra bit of hardware to use headphones.
Business Insider reports that the “Growing Up” commercials have been taken down from Samsung Mobile USA YouTube channel and the main Samsung YouTube channel. The news outlet found that the video can be viewed on an archived version of the Samsung Mobile USA YouTube channel on the Wayback Machine.
Samsung did not immediately respond to a Gizmodo request for comment on the reason for the removal of these ads.
The video is still available on Samsung regional YouTube channels, like Samsung Denmark and Samsung Malaysia.