Because strats sell. Oddly shaped guitars don't, or at least not for a long time, and would never break into the top 10 best selling guitar shapes.
- Flat top
- Solid body, typically softer/lighter woods
- Bolt-on neck (as opposed to set or through-body)
- Double cutout (as opposed to single/no cutout, V, or other irregular shaped necks) with a longer cutout on top compared to the bottom
- Carved cavity in the top of the body
- "Loaded" pickguard (electronics mounted to it, instead of the body)
- Straight jack mounted into the pickguard
- "Tummy tuck" carved in the back
- Fat/flat shaped bottom of the body like a tele, as opposed to rounded like an LP.
All of these are functional properties of the guitar that have tradeoffs and benefits compared to other designs.
You can have two strats sound completely different but look identical to the untrained eye and the reason for preferring the style has a lot to do with the weight of the instrument and how that weight is distributed when playing standing, and how the body fits in your hands/arms and against your body. There's an argument to be made that the strat is near optimal for comfort in playing.
If you look at competing designs that (PRS McCarty, Ibanez, Schecter, Gretsch - basically anyone) the specific curves may be different but they all look like a Strat because it's genuinely hard to design a different body that feels the same.
The St Vincent signature is one style that I think needs to get more popular but it's not for everyone.
[1] https://chinese-guitars.com/products/black-stratocaster-styl...
Also that first example is a Fender, afaict. Fender has been making cheap strats and teles in China for years. They used to do it exclusively under the Squire brand name but that changed about a decade ago.
I personally do not like the price though.
I don't think that's true at all. A strat ("strat style" or "s-style") is a shape and configuration. Many of the non-Fender strats are perfectly fine guitars (I have one) from major manufacturers like Ibanez, ESR, Jackson, and others. See forex: https://www.sweetwater.com/c589--S_style--Electric_Guitars
What I meant by "copy" is when it looks exactly the same.
Fender will have a difficult time claiming much in the way of the design of the pickups or pickguard, or the tremelo bridge, because some of that was in the original design patent anyway, and that is long expired.
Plus, for example, the two-pivot trem bridge design they use now that has been copied is not the same as in the patent; they actually copied this innovation themselves. And they use different tuners I think.
Much of this stuff has been litigated already in 2009. And again, a really important point is that back in 2009 they could not prove they had chain of title to even make any claim of copyright, even if such a claim were possible.
FMIC could not or would not demonstrate that they had ownership (and there is really good, very obvious evidence in the market that CBS could not prove that in 1969 either)
So if the Thomann case goes to court in Europe they will have to prove they do, and if it gets into a discovery process the court might hear that Fender have been advised that they definitely do not, and that would be devastating, because that would cast the letters they have been sending in a very different light.
Almost all of the variation between sufficiently similar electric guitars, barring the quality of the pickups and maybe some of the electronics, can be eliminated in the setup.
And a lot of the expensive luxury stuff people are convinced has an impact on the sound has approximately zero impact on the sound.
Making two guitars sound similar, especially if the goal was that these guitars should sound similar, isn't all that hard. But also just because they're both the same style of guitar, doesn't mean the goal was for them to sound the same. Even just looking at Fender's line up, different strats have different pickups which are designed to sound different