Apple Watch vs Samsung | This Watch Will Save Your Life | 3

0:16It's October 5th, 2016 at Louisville International Airport in Kentucky. 44-year-old Brian Green buckles a seatbelt and stows his overnight bag under the seat in front of him. He's on Southwest Airlines Flight 994, headed to Baltimore on a business trip. But for the plane ride, he's wearing a blue track jacket and Nikes. He takes his new Samsung phone out of his pants pocket and texts his wife to say the plane's about to take off, and he'll call when he gets to his hotel. Welcome on board Flight 994. We are currently third in line for takeoff. We ask that your seats and tray tables are in the upright position, and please turn off all personal electronic devices or put them in airplane mode.

1:00However, if any passengers have a new Samsung Note 7 phone, you are required to power down your device for the duration of our trip. Thank you for choosing Southwest Airlines. Enjoy your flight. Green shakes his head in frustration that he won't be able to use his phone at all while they're in the air. Two weeks ago, Samsung issued a recall for his original phone due to a defective battery. He exchanged it at the AT &T store for this new replacement model. It should be just fine, but he shuts it down anyway and places it back in his pocket. Green looks left and right, trying to figure out what the popping sound is he just heard.

1:39A woman across the aisle points at him in horror. Oh my God, his pants are on fire! Hideous, thick, green-gray smoke billows out of Green's pocket. The reek of burnt rubber fills the cabin. Green grabs his smoking phone and throws it into the aisle. A nearby passenger waves his hands in front of his face, trying to clear the smoke. Don't throw it at me! Get that thing off the plane! Passengers leap out of their seats and retrieve their bags from the overhead compartments. A flight attendant struggles down the aisle to stop them. Leave your bags! Get off the plane immediately! Lee, your nearest exit may be behind you.

2:17I repeat, leave your bags! Luckily, no one is hurt in the incident. But Brian Green's smoldering hunk of electronics burns a hole through the carpet and sears the plane's subfloor. It's just one of over a hundred cases of Samsung Note 7 devices catching fire or overheating in the hands of unsuspecting owners. But for weeks after the incident, Samsung doesn't properly acknowledge the problem. Airlines around the world ban the Note 7 from flights as if they're blowtorches or bombs. Videos crop up on YouTube of characters in Grand Theft Auto buying Samsung phones at guns and ammo shops and lobbing them like grenades at passing cars and pedestrians.

3:03Samsung's stock plunges by$17 billion. It is the biggest brand fiasco in recent memory. And it comes, just as Apple triumphantly celebrates a new record. The Apple Watch now commands one half of the entire smartwatch market. Samsung trails in third place behind Fitbit, followed by a pack of Android competitors like Motorola, Fossil, and Swatch. Samsung's latest smartwatch has a big, beautiful, round face with a dazzling, rotating bezel that controls the menu. But what good is that if people fear their device could explode into flames?

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5:22From Wondery, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. Music

5:50In the last episode, Samsung launched a defective smartwatch in the rush to beat Apple to market. And Apple overcame design challenges to unveil its first wearable computer. The Apple Watch outsold nearly every other competitor, but still fell short of its promise as an advanced health device. Now, in 2017, Samsung is on the ropes. The pressure is on for their smartwatch to make up for the bad exploding phone PR and plummeting sales. Apple sold an estimated 12 million watches in its first year to pull in$6 billion in revenue and slay the smartwatch market. But the latest two updates to the first Apple Watch are falling flat.

6:35Sales dropped 55 % compared to the previous year. Consumers balk at buying a$400 watch that does the same things their iPhone does, just more slowly and illegibly. If Apple doesn't deliver on a smartwatch that changes people's lives the way the iPod and the iPad did, Samsung's big, beautiful, round fashion piece will come gunning for the Apple loyalists who don't see a reason to wear a boxy computer on their arm. This is Episode 3. This watch will save your life.

7:17It's a rainy August night in 2017 in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the second inning of the first of a three-game series between arch-rivals the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogarts blasts a line drive and races to second. Heavy hitter Rafael Devers takes one last practice swing and steps up to the plate. Raindrops drip from the brim of his batting helmet. The Yankees catcher signals to their pitcher for the next pitch. He uses a secret code because the runner on second base has a sight line to him and could see and read his usual signs. Normally the Red Sox player on second wouldn't be able to break the code, but tonight is different.

8:03High up in the ballpark, in the Red Sox video room, the cameraman zooms in on the Yankees catcher's hand. A Red Sox staffer beside him squints at the monitor. There it is. Pause. Right there. The staffer stands as if frozen. Only the darting of his eyes betray how furiously he's calculating. Got it. It takes him mere seconds to break the Yankees' code. He's been studying their catcher's signals since the game started. The staffer grabs his cell phone and texts the decoding information to the smartwatch of an assistant trainer in the Red Sox dugout. The team is using a watch for this ruse because Major League Baseball prohibits the use of cell phones during games.

8:48In the dugout, the trainer casually glances at his watch. He leans close to the guy sitting next to him, star second baseman Dustin Pedroia, and passes on the decoding formula. Pedroia walks to the front of the dugout and communicates the vital intel in a few deft hand movements to their runner on second. All of this happens in the space of three pitches to Devers. Now, Xander Bogarts on second sees the catcher's sign for the fourth pitch, and he knows exactly what pitch is on the way. He signals curveball on the outside to Rafael Devers. Devers nods. The pitcher winds up and throws. Devers reaches for the ball, connects, and lofts a high fly over the left field for a home run.

9:38Two-nothing Sox. In the Yankee dugout, manager Joe Girardi shakes his head in disgust. He turns to his assistant. Did you see that trainer look at his Apple Watch and then whisper something to Pedroia? I bet you$1 ,000 they're cheating. They're in deep ****. Weeks later, the New York Times breaks the story that the Red Sox used an Apple Watch to cheat. It eventually comes out that their trainer used a Fitbit watch, but the correction is lost in an avalanche of outrage and media coverage. The scandal ends up giving Apple Watch weeks at the top of the news cycle and in the eyes and ears of their target demographic, men ages 18 to 45.

10:24What could have become a publicity nightmare turns out to be a publicity boon for Apple, one which couldn't have come at a better time. One week after the story goes viral, they launch the completely redesigned watch Series 3. It features crucial improvements like a new microchip that makes it 70 % faster, longer battery life, a stronger, faster Bluetooth connection, Apple Pay, and a model with a cellular connection that finally unleashes the watch from the phone. It's a whole new ballgame. The cherry on top? A budget-friendly older Model 1 costs only$250, the lowest-priced Apple Watch ever. It cuts into Samsung's main advantage as a cheaper alternative.

11:11At the launch event, CEO Tim Cook announces that Apple has surpassed Rolex, the Rolls-Royce of the luxury Swiss watchmakers, as the biggest watchmaker in the world by revenue in just two years. Meanwhile, Samsung lags in fifth place in the wearables sector behind Chinese brands Xiaomi, Fitbit, and Huawei. And Apple's testing some new technology that will entice even more consumers to the smartwatch bandwagon. If their experiment pans out, it will reduce Samsung's smartwatch to little more than an afterthought in the watch universe. Just another pretty face.

11:57It's a humid spring evening in 2018 in Kyle, Texas, about 20 miles southwest of Austin. 46-year-old Kevin Foley walks into a movie multiplex and steps up to the ticket counter. One ticket for Avengers Infinity War. You got it. You're in Theater 7. Foley walks down a long corridor and enters the darkened theater. He picks a seat in a middle row and settles in to wait for the trailers to start. But something doesn't feel right. He can't seem to breathe normally. He feels like he's hyperventilating but not getting any air at all to his lungs. And the more he thinks about his breathing, the more out of sync he seems to get.

12:42The person sitting next to him notices he's clutching the armrests and gasping. Hey, are you okay? You need me to call an usher? Or 911? Foley shakes his head in confusion. He's distracted by the buzzing of the Apple Watch on his wrist. He looks at it and sees an alert that reads, Your heart has shown signs of an irregular rhythm suggestive of atrial fibrillation. Despite the ominous alert, he feels his breathing slowly smoothing out. It's almost back to normal, but he's too spooked to stay for the film. He stands up and turns to the concerned man in the next seat. Thanks, I'm better now. Excuse me, I gotta get to the ER.

13:26Foley white-knuckles it to the nearest emergency room, where tests show he's in AFib, an irregular heartbeat pattern that can lead to blood clots, stroke, and other fatal outcomes. Doctors stabilize his heart over the next few days. When he gets back home, he tells everyone who'll listen that if it weren't for his Apple Watch, He might be dead. The irregular heartbeat monitoring won't be on the market until the fall. Foley's part of an experimental study Apple is conducting with Stanford University. But the Apple marketing department makes the most of the anecdotal research they gather during the beta stage, and the media runs with stories of scores of test subjects like Foley.

14:09Sales of current Apple Watch models surge. When the Series 4 arrives in September, it features fall detection with an SOS trigger, high and low heart rate detection, and an electrocardiogram app. The last two features come with FDA approval as medical devices. Finally, the Apple Watch is delivering real health features, and it's a smash hit. Before the year's out, Apple ships more than 11 million Series 4 watches to capture half of the smartwatch market. Sales snowball the following year, resulting in a new record for the company. Apple outsells the entire Swiss watch industry. The Swiss makers total only 21 million watch sales to Apple's 31 million worldwide.

15:02Apple's home run coincides with a deluge of new health-focused products in the Android space, which also boosts the rankings of Fitbit, Huawei, Garmin, and Fossil. In 2020, Samsung hangs on to a 10 % share of the smartwatch market and is once again playing catch-up. The company is working on an ECG app and other fitness and health offerings for its next watch update. But they're steering their development of smart watches in a wholly different, supercharged direction.

15:43It's December 2021 near Busan, South Korea. Hi, Song Lee. Good morning. Please stretch your body. 29-year-old Song Lee opens her eyes and stretches her arms wide in her bed. She looks out the window at a view of rolling hills and a temple. Her house is part of the Eco Delta Smart Village, South Korea's first smart city experiment. And it is so much nicer than the 6 '4 apartment she used to share with her sister and parents in traffic-heavy downtown Busan. Her younger sister appears at the door to her bedroom. Song Lee, come to the living room. Let's pick a yoga class to do before work. Lee gets up and follows her sister to the three-foot-tall mirror in the living room.

16:32It's the nerve center of their high-tech home. Her sister taps her finger on the mirror. An interactive touchscreen appears superimposed on their image. It looks like something from a sci-fi movie. Thick white lines outline a stylized female body at the top, surrounded by health measurement readings, height, weight, heart rate, and body mass index. Below the figure are icons depicting activities. Lee's sister taps on an icon of a bed in a crescent moon. A sleep measurement screen shows up with a graph depicting her activity over the course of the previous night. Oh, look how the house measured my sleep last night.

17:15I had such terrible cramps it woke me up and made my heart rate go so high. Lee clasps her hands over her ears. Ew, stop! TMI! And now some software engineers at Samsung know all that too. The Lees are one of 54 families that have volunteered to share the most intimate aspects of their lives with Samsung and its Korean government partners. Everything from their reproductive cycles to how much waste they generate. They've all agreed to wear Samsung smartwatches day and night for three years. The watches are synced to smart mirrors and computer tablets. In exchange, the test subjects live rent-free.

17:56Samsung supplies 15 of the appliances in the homes, including refrigerators, air filters, and something called an air dresser, a closet that steams, dry cleans, and sanitizes clothes. The Korean electronics giant is making huge strides in the Internet of Things, despite yet another calamity-filled few years for its controlling family. In 2017, Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee's son and successor, Chairman Lee Jae-young, was sentenced to five years in prison for bribery and embezzlement crimes, which also took down South Korea's president. And a much-ballyhooed new phone, the Galaxy Fold, flopped in 2019 when its faulty screens peeled off like the loose rind of a mandarin orange.

18:43But despite the corporate chaos, in 2021, Samsung's Galaxy Gear 3 smartwatches are selling strong. Sales are double the previous year due to the impressive battery life and elegant circular design of the latest models. But Apple still commands more than a third of the entire smartwatch market. Samsung clings to second place with a 10 % share just barely ahead of Fitbit, Fossil, Garmin, and Chinese brands Amazfit and Huawei. If Samsung can't woo more watch wearers away from Apple and its Android competitors soon, their time near the top of the rankings will tick right by.

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20:302021 in Carlsbad, California. 17-year-old Ted Barrett sits in front of his computer and signs on to an online Samsung community message board. His bedroom walls are covered with Japanese anime posters. Barrett wears black jeans and a graphic T-shirt of an obscure Korean hip-hop band. He types the words Disappearing Galaxy Gear Watch Faces into the search bar, and a topic thread appears. Barrett angrily scans the comments. Holy mother of God, Samsung, I'm not the only one furious about this. Barrett talks to himself when he's mad, and he's plenty mad now. He's a stylish kid, and he matches his watch to his mood and outfit.

21:13This morning, he tried to change his watch face to an elaborate green and gold image featuring peacocks. to match his emerald-colored shirt. But it disappeared. He hits reply and vents to the thread. And where, oh, where are all of my purchased watch faces from 2018 and 2019, Samsung? You get sued by Swatch and you tuck your tail between your legs and essentially steal faces I purchased with cold cash. No refunds, no letting me download my faces that I bought legally. Way to go, you putzes. I hope Google's Pixel kicks your Galaxy's sails into the dirt. Two years earlier, Swatch slapped Samsung with a$100 million lawsuit alleging trademark infringement of scores of downloadable watch face designs.

22:01The suit includes Barrett's Peacock Face, which originally decorated a$650 ,000 custom watch. Pending a ruling, Samsung has removed the watch faces in question from its app stores and its customers' devices. But they don't keep a close eye on their third-party developers, and hundreds of stolen designs still slip through the cracks, allowing customers to purchase them. Now, Samsung watch wearers like Barrett are fuming, and Samsung's highly touted personal customization branding has egg on its face. But Samsung has bigger problems. Apple currently commands more than 50 % of the smartwatch market, thanks to annual model updates with increasingly beefed-up health and safety technology, always-lit screens, better battery life, and collaborations on bands with luxury labels like Hermes and Missoni.

22:58In comparison, Samsung's App Store looks as empty as toy store shelves the day after Christmas. If they don't wow the world with their next launch, the Korean dynasty's sliver of the smartwatch pie will crumble into mere dust.

23:222021 in Glendale, California. Su Min Park sits in her hospital bed, gazing down at her firstborn baby girl nestled in her arms. Her daughter is just five hours old, has a shock of black hair standing straight up like a cockatoo. Park is exhausted, but too exhilarated to sleep. She desperately wants to tell her friend in Seoul her big news. Right now, she's alone in the room with her phone out of reach in her handbag. She reaches for the button to ring a nurse for help, but realizes she could just use her new smartwatch instead. It has the Korean equivalent of WhatsApp on it, Kakao Talk. She caresses the baby's cheek and starts the message.

24:07Hey, Google. Send a DM to Min Ray Chan Kakao Talk. All right. What's the message? Park gently bops her little girl's nose with her fingertip. My dearest Min, you were right. It's a beautiful girl and she's... Perfect. Heart emoji. Pacifier emoji. Park sees her message scroll across her watch face. Ready to send it? Yes. It's one small step for this first-time mom, but one giant leap for Samsung. For years, KakaoTalk, Korea's number one mobile chat app, has refused to sign on to Samsung's proprietary Tizen platform. They claim the Tizen market is too small and the operating system too clunky to code.

25:00But Samsung has finally pivoted. They dropped Tizen and now use Google's new and improved Wear OS, formerly known as Android Wear, the most popular operating system in the Android space. Now, Samsung is drawing on a vast pool of Android app developers. That makes the newly launched Galaxy Watch Series 4 a warning shot across Apple's bow. Just like the Apple Watch, it can make and receive calls without being connected to a phone. And it has a wealth of new health, fitness, safety, and Google-supported apps like Google Maps and KakaoTalk, a towering South Korean brand, and a triumph for a fiercely nationalistic corporation like Samsung.

25:46But Apple has just reached a new milestone in the smartwatch era. 100 million active users. And for the first time, its watch features a softer, more rounded design and a unique refractive edge that gives a full-screen watch face the appearance of wrapping seamlessly around the case. In other words, the Series 7 looks more like a traditional watch to pull more OG watch fans into the smartwatch fold. But if Samsung continues to attract app developers to work with them in the new Google OS era, One of Apple Watch's most significant advantages over the South Korean conglomerate will evaporate, just like Samsung's stolen watch faces.

26:36It's winter 2021 in Manhattan. Alex Morales stands on the sidewalk in front of the Upper East Side Apple Store on Madison Avenue. He takes his N95 out of his pocket and masks up. Omicron cases are spiking and he's not taking any chances. The store is quiet for a weekday afternoon. Morales walks to the table displaying Apple watches. He's decided to get himself an Apple watch for Christmas to motivate him to get in better shape. A salesperson appears at his side. Can I answer any questions about the watches? A lot of people have been asking us about the blood oxygen measurement. You can use the watch like a pulse oximeter if you get COVID.

27:19Morales picks up a Series 7 in sleek white. I'd love it if my watch looked out for drops in my oxygen levels. I know some people who got really sick in the first wave of COVID, and they had no idea what was going on with their lungs. But are the readings accurate? The salesperson nods emphatically. Absolutely. The blood oxygen app is super reliable, usually within a few points of the readings you get with an oximeter from a drugstore. But it's not available on the SC or our other lower-priced models. The Apple guy straps the watch on Morales' wrist. He likes how the white pops against his dark skin.

27:56He'd planned to spend only$275 on a lower-end model, but the pulse oximeter is a game-changer for him. $400 is a small price to pay for a watch that could save his life. But when he gets home and downloads the Pulse Oximeter app, he gets wildly fluctuating results. One moment he's at 98%, the next is reading so low he thinks he should head straight to the ER. He's so frustrated that he Googles the issue and discovers a long history of problems with Apple's watch sensors detecting the heart rate of people with tattoos on their arms or the oxygen level of users with dark skin. Morales is black, and it galls him to think that Apple billionaires in Silicon Valley are disregarding people of color in their product design.