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Samsung's in big trouble. Obama just made a Note 7 joke

Technically Incorrect: During a speech in Miami, the president has a good chuckle at Samsung's exploding problem.

Chris Matyszczyk
2 min read

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.


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And they just go boom!

White House/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

When things go wrong in public, there are stages of pain.

First, Twitter makes jokes about you. Then late-night comedians, who get most of their subject matter from Twitter, do the same.

You know you have a searing issue, however, when the president starts making fun of you.

On Thursday, President Obama was speaking in Miami.

One of his subjects was Obamacare.

In a clip posted to Twitter by Politico's Dan Diamond, the president made an analogy. He compared his Affordable Care Act to a company releasing smartphones.

If the phone has a few bugs, he said, they don't throw it away. They fix it. They upgrade it.

With a chuckle, he added: "Unless it catches fire. Then you pull it off the market."

This is something Samsung was criticized for doing far too slowly with its Note 7. Worse, its replacement Note 7s, which were declared safe, also began to explode.

The president, though, continued his analogy: "But you don't go back to using a rotary phone. You don't say 'Well, we're repealing smartphones. We're just gonna do the dial-up thing.' That's not what you do."

Samsung didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, when your product becomes a topic of amusement right at the top -- and is the object of a big laugh from the audience -- you know that there is so much work to do to restore faith, not just in the phone but in the brand.

Samsung has shown initiative by setting up kiosks at airports to replace Note 7s. However, there are still said to be more than a million of them in circulation.

There's no insurance, indeed, that another one won't blow up.