It's so sad to see this kind of stuff. It's not like the Galaxy S4 is a slow device. It reminds me of Nokia used a fake video [1] to sell the Lumia 920, which was supposed to have a pretty good camera. It just ends up being an unfortunate distraction that causes people to mistrust you.
Ars is right that this isn't new. I remember ATI being caught in the Quake/Quack thing [2] a dozen years ago.
That reminds me of when NT first came out. They had a demo where they'd show bar charts of CPU utilisation for multiple processors and show them ramping up and down exactly in sync as they ran more software on the box. Except the demo was a fake. It was actually showing CPU utilisation for one CPU on both bars. I actually saw someone from Microsoft show this at a trade show and I did a lot of work with Sun multicore boxes and it looked weird how the bars were exactly in step, like far too perfect to be a real world demo, but I figured they were just using a demo app that was rigged to use exactly the same cycles on both CPUs or something, not that the whole thing was a lie.
Boy that dates me, apart from the fact this was NT maybe 3.5 or so, what happened to PC trade shows?
Ars is right that this isn't new. I remember ATI being caught in the Quake/Quack thing [2] a dozen years ago.
[1] - http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3294545/nokias-pureview-ads...
[2] - http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_chea...