The West has spent decades calling Asian companies copycats. Watch how the story changes when Apple arrives late.
When Apple introduced the iPhone Duo on Sept. 9, it called the phone a "breakthrough foldable design." The phone may well be a fine piece of engineering, thin and durable, with a clever hinge. But it is not a breakthrough. Royole, a Chinese company, sold the first commercial foldable in 2018. Samsung followed a few months later with the Galaxy Fold, which had well-publicized early problems that it spent the next several years fixing in full view of its customers. Huawei and others tried their own designs, and suppliers slowly learned how to make flexible screens that didn't crease and hinges that didn't fail. Apple watched all of that before it made its move.
Waiting was a perfectly sensible thing for Apple to do. What bothers me is how the waiting has been described. Commentators say Apple "let the technology mature," "refused to rush" and "learned from others' mistakes." Each of those descriptions is fair. Now imagine that Samsung had sat back while Apple absorbed the embarrassments of a first-generation product, and then arrived years later with a more polished version. Few people would call that patience. Most would say Samsung had copied Apple, followed it or finally caught up.
That double standard has deep roots. The Western business press has long assumed that American companies are innovators until proven otherwise, and that Asian companies are imitators until they prove otherwise. The same strategy is called learning from the market in one case and copying in the other. A company's passport shouldn't decide which word it gets.
The first mover in any category pays for everyone who comes after it. It finds out which designs fail and which compromises buyers will accept, and it takes the reputational damage when the technology isn't ready. The companies that follow inherit those lessons at no cost. Apple is entitled to that bargain, and it has made it many times before. It did not invent the graphical interface, the smartphone, multi-touch, the tablet or the smartwatch. Its real talent lies in taking ideas that already exist and fitting them into an ecosystem that people find coherent and are glad to pay for. That talent is formidable, and nobody thinks Apple stopped being innovative because others went first. The same courtesy should be extended to Seoul, Tokyo and Shenzhen.
America has been through this before. In the early 1980s, Japanese cars were dismissed as cheap imports, and Washington responded with export restraints instead of admiration. Within a decade, Honda was building Accords in Ohio, and Lexus and Acura were competing at the top of the market. Chinese automakers, whose strength in batteries and software is now plain to see, are following a similar path. Innovation builds on what came before it, and being first has never given anyone a permanent claim on it.
None of this excuses genuine theft. Counterfeiting a trademark or stealing a design is wrong wherever it happens, and the courts are right to punish it. But studying a product that is already on the market and building a better one is simply competition, the same thing American capitalism has praised for generations. It rightly calls competition good for consumers, and that judgment shouldn't become a moral charge just because the competitor happens to be foreign.
So let Apple take its victory lap. If the Duo turns out to be the foldable that finally wins over the mass market, that will be a real achievement, and consumers and shareholders will reward it accordingly. But Samsung and Royole deserve credit for building the road Apple is now driving on. And the next time an Asian company arrives late to a category that an American company pioneered, perhaps the press will describe it the way it describes Apple, as a company that learned from the market.
