This informative video was made by one of YouTube's biggest tech reviewers, Mrwhosetheboss, real name Arun Rupesh Maini, who talks about a 2022 Samsung scandal that was discovered with their Galaxy 22 lineups of phones where they were discovered to be dishonest about the performance promised in the new lineup of smartphones. He mentions that consumers are annually promised a 20-30% performance upgrade each year by phone manufacturers and chip makers, however, it has been discovered that software on Samsung phones called the GameOptimzing Service runs in the background to limit the performance of apps and games, except for benchmarking apps, to give this false idea to consumers that their phones are indeed achieving the numbers promised to them from ads. In the video, Arun talks about how the chip makers aren’t technically lying about the new top speeds of chips, however, what is not taken into account with their numbers is that these new phones being pushed out do not have the battery nor cooling capabilities to produce the benchmarks advertised on these chips, lest they the phones battery life cut in half and possibly permanently damage the phones due to overheating. Another issue is that each year the chip's top performance is improving, and so does the battery needed to achieve such speeds, which does not fall in line with the more stagnant battery sizes of new phones.
What is shown here is reflective of some common ethical beaches talked about by Brenda R. Sims (1993) in their article about ethics. Simply having the chip makers talk about the new top benchmark numbers that these new phone chips are achieving and not mention that most phones will never be reaching them due to hardware constraints is deceitful and in line with one of the categories Sims has for writers manipulating information, this being a classic example of a false impression. Consumers are advertised these are the top numbers of this specific component of their phones but are not notified that their phones will never reach this as their phone battery and cooling capabilities can’t support these chips at those top advertised speeds, which can also be argued by Sim's article that it can go in the section of Missing or omitted information that readers need or that they have a right to know, as people who upgrade their phones yearly are doing it for the promised 20-30% improvement of performance as mentioned by Arun in his video.
Some might view it as a good thing that Samsung has decided to have their GameOptimzing Service lower performance to prevent their phones from dying, though having it specifically exclude benchmarking apps that are supposed to be reflective of one actual phone performance is misleading and providing false information in Samsung’s part as it gives the impression to the users of these apps that this is the phones average performance that matches what they were advertised when purchasing the phones, when really they have their performance curved outside of these benchmarking apps.
The worst part is that this issue is not just isolated to Samsung as major phone companies have been caught doing the same thing such as Apple, and Huawei to meet their performance benchmark quota for each new phone. You have these technical communicators push this misinformation to the public to meet quotas for the sake of their companies, which falls unfortunately in line with what Pauly and Rioean's (1986) definition of technical writing is in a career job which is to have people generate documents to help enable companies and business to help active their goals and maintain their operations (which in this case, help these phone manfatures maintain their business model). Even Professor Ornatowski (2009) adds to this mentioning that is a common conflict among writers as it is in their best interests to have their writing serve those who are employing them to meet their company goals, however, they must also remain objective and factual about the information they tell audiences. This conflict ends up having a lot of writers having to take a lot of workarounds to try to meet the demands of both their companies and writing ethics as seen in this artifact by providing the actual benchmarks that these chips can achieve and having that pushed to their audience to meet their company quote of 20-30% improvement, at the expense of not disclosing that these numbers will not be achieved through normal usage. Sometimes this works and writers and companies can get away with this, and sometimes like in this situation, when the full truth comes out, the companies and writers are under fire as seen by Samsung’s president having to come out and apologize.
Make no mistake, this issue and manner of writing will continue to exist as mentioned before, almost all phone companies have/do this, they just don’t disclose it or haven't been caught. With year after year, the chip performance is improving at the expense of more battery needed, and the battery on new phones lagging behind the chip performance, Samsung and other phone/chip manufacturing technical writing teams will have to continue to tip-toe the line of ethics to meet companies benchmark deadlines to try to please both sides.