We can't have an HP logo in a circle because Apple has an apple that resembles a circle!?
We can't center an HP logo because Apple centers their logo!?
We can't have a metallic logo because Apple does that!?
We can't have a rectangular screen because Apple has one just in that shape!?
We can't have a silvery finish because apple has one!
We can't have a qwerty keyboard because Apple has one!
And so on.
Are you joking?
These are all done 100 times over. In combination with each other.
The only resemblance I see are standard design choices being implemented. Like a monitor on a stand.
These "standard design choices" hadn't ever been common in other products. Were all designers suddenly enlightened at some point on what computers should look like? (oh, wait! they were, by Apple)
And when you place that centerd logo on a thin form factor display/pc, that becomes a violation? Or is it when you make the keyboard silvery in color? Or is it when you make the frame as thin as possible given the technology and manufacturing capabilities you have at the time?
That's like saying Ford violates Toyota's "trade dress" when they combine 4 tires on a car, with an engine somewhere inside, and paint the body red. And the vehicle weighs less that 2000 lbs.
4 or 5 standard design choices in combination with one another is not a "trade dress" when those choices are generic and have been done a million times before.
That's all design is: a combination of functional and aesthetic choices, that lead to a particular look.
Silver wasn't very popular until not long ago. Black was the default, and still is for many manufacturers. It is also currently possible to make the frame even thinner, or non-existent. The choice to make it that thick (and black) shows that it's not about technical limits or 'evolution'. You can absolutely make a computer that doesn't look like an iMac; in fact everybody has been doing it for years.
That's exactly the problem. HP is using the same combination here, the resembles is obvious and the sad part is to give the reason to Apple on this :(
Copying one thing, maybe two things is a coincidence, copying everything is flat out cloning a design without a lot of thought or innovations. Hell, they even copied the finishes on the metal.
The stand seems to be a different size and shape.
The OS, the most important part of that device, is completely different.
Now if that's what you call an iMac, then you must also call every PC made a Dell and every truck a Ford.
(And while we're nitpicking, the iMac hasn't had a white acrylic chin in five years.)
HP has multiple different lines of All-In-Ones that have absolutely no resemblance to anything Apple makes, meaning they haven't ~chanced~ or ~evolved~ into doing this look. Even Vizio (a company that was dinged for -substantially- replicating Apple's accessory design for their first all-in-one outing) managed to use a completely different finish and different foot profile.
The gestalt of Apple's desktop lineup was needlessly duplicated by a company that has the talent and resources to do otherwise. Argue another angle.
This product from HP is shameful.
I can't really see brushed aluminum as "better" finish choice than satin nickel, semi-opaque plastic, oil-rubbed bronze, polished marble, cherry burlwood, or rich Corinthian leather.
Other companies should feel free to use it, but they must understand that they will suffer the withering wrath of my derisive scorn if they are going to be so unabashedly derivative in their design choices.
Note : copying does not necessarily == morally reprehensible. However, facts are facts.
Because it limits choices. Instead of 2 different options for your all-in-one desktop you have 1 multiplied by 2.
Mathematics aside, you would've hoped that they could come up with an improvement over the iMac, instead of a copy. Perhaps the port access on the side of the base counts?
You forgot the "2 choices" part, ie that the numbers are pointers to qualitative differences, thus 1A + 1B != 2 * 1A.
Prior to the PC there were lots of different kinds and styles, and post PC there were 'beige boxes' everywhere. Now true there were still outliers like the Epson QX10 and some others but they were quashed by the larger market.
[1] www.vintage.org
When you thought it was damning of Apple or ironic that people accuse HP, didn't it trouble you that the quote presents copying in a worse light that stealing? I.e didn't it occurred that stealing, as defined in the quote, must describe something much more creative than mere copying?
Artists commonly quote Picasso to refer that when practicing you should copy another artist that you admire. In the process you would develop you own style and in a sense you stole that from the original artist.
My point in this case (and I am not an Apple fan), is that HP didn't differentiate enough in this product. I was being literal on the quote, they should steal the iMac, no just copying it.
Edit: I just want to know if we're all on the same page that IP exists to monopolize the market, not benefit the consumer in any way.
It only started to "seem" that way in 2008 or so when Google-- a large corporation that wants to monopolize a segment of the market- started a propaganda campaign against Apple to try and rationalize ripping off the iPhone with android.
>Does anyone actually believe it's to empower consumers?
The really unfortunate thing about this propaganda campaign is that it has been so successful that it has gotten people to close their minds off to not only other viewpoints, but the very nature of the system.
Patents allow the advancement of science to occur more rapidly by incentivizing disclosure. When someone invents something really new, they could keep it a secret and have a monopoly on that product for as long as it takes their competitors to figure out how to do it-- which is often many years. The patent system gets them to reveal it so that the competitors can start with the state of the art, and then extend it.
Google, et. al. want to perverse this system by, instead of extending the state of the art, simply copying the state of the art and then hoping to get away with it in court. To provide cover they've got legions of people clamoring that "patents are "bad" and stuff like that".
The reality is, getting a patent is not unreasonably difficult. Thus small startups (like google once was) can patent their technologies (like google once did for page rank) and get protection from major existing players (like google once needed from Yahoo, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Wired Search, etc).... and leverage that protection into investment from Venture Capitalists (like google did.)
If you have any question about googles hypocrisy, note that they only say patents are bad when it comes to other people's patents-- they viciously protect PageRank and they sued Apple with motorola patents they acquired for that specific purpose... and are trying to reneg on their agreement to license patents under FRAND terms in order to get leverage to force Apple to license its patents.
Patents do empower consumers, when the system works- when companies abide by the rules and use them to get a leg up in advancing technology.
We are not all on the same page, though HN may seem like a monoculture because there are a lot of Apple haters here. But if you look at these discussions you'll notice they are generally uninformed about the history (eg: bringing up Xerox) and don't even know what patents are (eg: confusing design and utility patents, thinking 2001 or Star Trek are "prior art" or citing the LG Prada, or claiming Apple is claiming a patent on rounded corners.)
One thing you'll never see an anti-IP person do, in my experience, is consider the ramifications of getting rid of all patent laws.
For instnace, consider how locked down devices would be when there was no such protection. Companies would hermetically seal devices to make it difficult for competitors to get inside them to understand how they work-- this would be bad for consumers.
Plus progress would be retarded. Most drugs that have been invented never would have been, and technology progress would be much, much slower.
It's popular to hate patents, and that position comes from taking for granted the benefits patents have provided, and focusing on perceived (and hypocritical in my opinion) problems with them.
Due to the contentious nature of this position, and the fact that every time I've expressed it on HN, I've been personally attacked, this will be my one comment on this subject, Sorry. Your question seems genuine, so I took the time to respond.
Made a quick search. Couldn't find a single lawsuit that Google had brought upon on a smaller or a bigger player. They protect Search technologies using Trade Secrets not Patents.
> they sued Apple with motorola patents they acquired for that specific purpose
Well technically it was still Motorola that sued Apple using it's own patents. And that was after the patent war had already consumed most of the tech media.
> get leverage to force Apple to license its patents.
Which is something that should be done! Why is it that technology that is essential for building cellphones has to be licensed (and at a pretty cheap rate) but technology that is selectively applicable like the dozens of patents including Swipe-To-Unlock, Unified Search, Pinch-To-Zoom etc are okay not to be licensed and yet be used to ban devices altogether?
> Most drugs that have been invented never would have been, and technology progress would be much, much slower.
Straw-man. Most people who are Anti-IP (I am not BTW), are against software patents NOT patents in general.
They protect Search technologies using Trade Secrets not Patents.
It only started to "seem" that way in 2008 or so when Google--
a large corporation that wants to monopolize a segment of the market-
started a propaganda campaign against Apple to try and
rationalize ripping off the iPhone with android.
There is a whole lot more than Google versus Apple in the software patents story, please read some more about it.
It's bad for the original creator, but long term it's probably bad for the copy-cat as well. How are you going to keep and foster top notch design talent if their assignment is to copy the competition instead of working on making something better?
And if you don't have good designers, you're at a disadvantage if the market starts to appreciate good design (as they seem to be doing more and more).
I think many people are surprisingly untechnical. Samsung had many tablet returns from customers who thought they had bought an iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if many companies would buy this computer because it "looks about the same" as the more expensive iMac.
http://images.apple.com/imac/images/overview_allinone.png [0]
versus
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/09/hp-spe... [1]
Not limited by, but your key(board) comparison completely skips over reality.
[0] http://www.apple.com/imac/ [1] http://www.engadget.com/photos/hp-spectre-one/
Metallic Logo: Nope. Appears to be a back-lit logo which is white in color [1]
Logo Positioning: Is similar but not the same. Apple's logo is not in the black frame region. They both are centered though, I give you that.
Aspect Ratio: iMac seems to be 8:5. This is 16:9
Foot Design: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/09/10/hp-imac/ Check the last image.
Choice of Material/Choice Of Finishing: Someone pointed out on the thread that HP is using plastic and not brushed aluminum.
Keyboard Design: There aren't many side shots of the smaller keyboard from Apple but [2] looks different from Spectre One.
Key Coloring: White on White vs White on Aluminium Grey.
Key Layout: Is Also different. Have a look.
Keyboard LED: Cannot deduct from image, so I will give you that.
Trackpad Design: Yes similar from top
Trackpad Footing: Check the side shots, they are different
keyboard battery chamber and trackpad battery chamber: Sorry cannot see from the shots.
[1] http://www.engadget.com/photos/hp-spectre-one/ [2] http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/electronics/detail-page...
Edit: iMac has 16:9 screens as well. So adding that here.
You're standing on a single extra key, a logo that might be backlit instead of foil, a different trackpad/keyboard foot arc, and the fact that they used plastic designed to mimic a specific metal with a specific finish. It's not enough for most observers, and HP is right to take some lumps over this.
Those decisions, insights, and the attitudes that evolved early personal computing have flipping zip-all to do with trade dress in the early 21st century.
Steve Jobs is saying it is easy to copy. But if you're great, you steal the fundamental idea and do something totally new with it.
Apple didn't just copy the phones already on the market, they stole the idea of a cellphone and did something fundamentally different.
So different that we had 6 months of people saying it was going to be a failure, Ballmer going on the record saying there's no way they'd sell any significant numbers, and the RIM engineers telling upper management that the iPhone couldn't possibly work the way apple said!
Thats "stealing" -- doing something for which there is nothing comparable on the market, in Steve Jobs view.
Copying is when you look at a successful product and mimic it down to the millimeter.
So while there were GUIs before the Mac, once Apple had stolen their ideas and transformed them the stuff that had come before simply looked like crap. Similarly previous attempts, including by Apple, to create tablet devices look like crap beside the iPad.
Is there an extended version of the linked video? I don't know where you got "and do something totally new with it" from his original quote. How did you extrapolate his true intent from the provided quote?
>Thats "stealing" -- doing something for which there is nothing comparable on the market, in Steve Jobs view.
That is certainly not the accepted definition of the word. I still don't understand how you've managed to take Steve Jobs words and claim they're a metaphor for "innovation". In what world are invent, innovate and steal synonymous?
Forgive me if I depart a moment from the explicit and literal, but I fail to see how you can apply ideas from music, poetry, zoology, art, and history without "doing something totally new with it." Did 19th century bookmakers and typesetters have the faintest idea what a computer was when they were practicing their craft? And would somebody making a computer screen without the slightest notion of what really went into calligraphy know which ideas to capture in writing rendering software? This is the essence of what Jobs meant by stealing. It wasn't, hey, let's just copy our competitor but make it cheaper.
As for "stealing," it's unfortunate word choice because the original quote from Picasso was in Spanish and he didn't say it in a trade (high art) where copying could be justified as "natural evolution."
When you steal, you make something others have done yours. While Apple built upon the work of others throughout its history, they made their products so distinctive that nobody would say could have come from anyone else.
Apple really hasn't "invented" anything. What they HAVE done is apply a keen sense of design and an obsessive focus on execution to a segment of a very diverse industry.
I think it goes without saying that Apple has had serious problems over its lifetime and there isn't a guarantee that they wont find themselves in that predicament again. My first computer was an Apple (//c, natch) and I can tell you that they nearly did themselves in a couple of times while IBM/Microsoft were leading the way.
Sic Transit Gloria.
It's most interesting that the biggest problems Apple faced were when it was trying to copy the IBM PC by building dozens of different Mac models with expansion slots.
Or when they forgot about developers and let MSFT gain 90% of the market.
Or: Lisa. The Apple ///. Etc etc etc.
That's why his example from the Macintosh days is about applying calligraphy to rendering typefaces on screen, or why later in the interview he talks about how Apple took great pride in hiring people with a diversity of backgrounds (ex. zoologists and poets)--all to maximize the probability that someone would make an unexpected connection and hence, innovation. It's a subtle point that I frequently see people overlook here, but anybody with humanities training will tell you that there is a tremendous difference between inspiration and plagiarism.
It's easily gleaned from the context. Clearly he is distinguishing between stealing and copying, the key differentiator I believe to be some metaphorical notion of possession.
From this idea you can infer that Jobs is saying that you can take a solution designed for (or, by possession, owned by) a given historical problem and repurpose it so that it can now solve a new problem.
That's the only way the quote makes sense, and that's the only way you can read Jobs's reference to the diverse fields of study his early Macintosh people had under their belt before tackling computer science. It was all about repurposing old ideas to meet new challenges.