Ridiculous. Other than the bezel color, bezel shape, metallic logo, logo positioning, aspect ratio, foot design, choice of materials, choice of finishing, keyboard design, key coloring, key layout, keyboard LED, keyboard footing, trackpad design, trackpad footing, keyboard battery chamber, and trackpad battery chamber, this is a totally unique design.
Things like choice of materials and finishing aren't "the natural evolution of computers". There are deliberate design decisions to the brushed aluminum design, decisions that HP didn't even bother to make for themselves.
Faster is "better" than slower. Easier is "better" than harder. Cheaper is "better" than more expensive. These are pretty obvious and well understood.
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.
I strongly disagree. These are aesthetic design choices, and are not fundamental to the evolution of personal computers. HP clearly copied the design of the iMac.
Note : copying does not necessarily == morally reprehensible. However, facts are facts.
Can someone explain why copying is bad? Do people really believe that a marketplace is so fragile, that unless an omnipotent actor interferes with trade, consumers will become victims to "copying"? Or that the poor consumer won't be able to distinguish between the box that says "HP" and the twice as expensive box that reads "Apple"?
Copying can be good and bad. I think most people would say that a copy that beats the original would be good. A knock-off or plagiarism would be bad.
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.
It seems like IP exists to empower corporations to monopolize segments of the market. Does anyone actually believe it's to empower consumers? Because that's the argument I typically hear.
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.
Obviously, not everyone here is on the same page, but there is a general consensus that patent laws are being used to suppress rather encourage innovation. Apple's suits against Samsung are an egregious recent example of the patent system harming innovation. There is room for nuance though; saying that the system is being abused doesn't mean that no ideas should be patentable.
>It seems like IP exists to empower corporations to monopolize segments of the market.
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.
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.
This is incorrect. There have been written concerns about software patents being monopolies at least since the year 1990 (http://deoxy.org/swpc.htm), not to mention the Free Software movement spreading the word against patents a lot earlier than 2008, the first Pirate Party was founded in 2006, and I bet I could dig a lot more examples of "prior art".
There is a whole lot more than Google versus Apple in the software patents story, please read some more about it.
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.
I should have known my distaste for IP was out of historical ignorance and susceptibility to propaganda campaigns! Only a fool would ignore the self-evident and empirically observable benefits of the Courts! I have since shed my contemporary principles of non-violence and adopted "the central planners know best!".
Without copying, design and implementation and business practices become bundled, reducing my options in a different way. If I like the kind of industrial design Apple encouraged but not the prevalence of non-commodity components or the aggressive deprecation of ports and interconnects or their policies towards independent developers, I can't get the product I want. I'd rather have commodity hardware that's beige and commodity hardware that's shiny and boutique hardware on the market, rather than have to choose one or two. It'd be one thing if Apple were willing to produce a wide variety of price/perf/design selections, but they're deliberately not.
The only similarity between these options are aesthetics. To argue they're the same product is to say all red coups are the same. No, they just happen to be red.
This is why copying is sad not why copying is bad. One of the coolest things is to look at personal computers built before the IBM PC and then look at computers built after the IBM PC. You can do this if you go a Vintage Computer Festival [1] at some point.
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.
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?
Damn right. Plus: way to get the quote wrong. It's about stealing some concept and making something of YOUR OWN with the inspiration, vs copying somebody else's work verbatim. That is, it applies exactly to this situation.
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?
Sorry if I didn't explain my point with the quote. It wasn't obvious to me when I wrote it that it could have several interpretations.
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.
Either you're being willfully obtuse, you're unaware of what the market for all-in-ones looks like right now, or else the entire tech industry is filled with dummies who aren't as observant and correct as you. Pick one.
(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.
Oh, come on. If you make the same choices as your competitor for nearly every item, that's copying.
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)
Really? Having a centered logo is part of a trade dress? Is it supposed to be 2 inches to the right for everyone else?
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.
No, that's like saying that Ford would violate Audi's trade dress if they combine slim headlights flush with the body, a large front grill in trapezoid shape with the logo on top, and two air intakes at the bottom edges. It would.
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.
Indeed, there was a huge production of so-called beige PCs, and nobody complained that they looked the same, since they looked like crap, and people wouldn't purposedly copy crap, now would they? The fact is that Apple products look gorgeous, and they want to keep it that way. Commoditization of that style would destroy its value completely.
That is, unless they keep leading the pack in design innovation, instead of trying to protect their old productions, and milk their fan base out of recycled ideas.
Come on, if you covered up the HP logo on that thing you would have called it a iMac. That was absolutely my first thought upon seeing it.
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 monitor looks to have a completely industry standard bezel width and corner shape that you can find on any number of monitors and TVs. And lacks the huge white 4 inch strip at the bottom.
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.
That profile shot of the Spectre is a bummer. They made it so ugly. So top-heavy. I feel bad for the industrial designers who had to work on this small-minded disaster, they must hate their jobs.
That's an honest effort but not enough. Throw the Apple Thunderbolt Display and the correct Apple Wireless Keyboard into the comparison and points 1, 3, 4, and 7 evaporate.
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.
Irrelevant and misapplied. This tape was from an era where foundational ideas in personal and graphical computing were being hashed out. Concepts like pointers, modality, bitmapping, state representation, humane I/O, task management, and basement-level software plumbing were being worked out. Basically: how do you turn massive industrial installations into a comprehensible and affordable machine that can fit in a home?
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.
"Stealing" in the sense that Jobs means it is a reappropriation of an idea from a seemingly unrelated field into the new one to solve a problem (typically in design it's a teaching problem).
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.
How do you people know what Jobs meant by the word "steal"? And it's always kinda opposite of what the usual meaning is. Is there a Steve Jobs dictionary somewhere?
How do you people know what Jobs meant by the word "steal"?
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.
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.
I didn't say Apple invented the personal computer, or the portable music player, or the smartphone. What they did, and did very skillfully, was to appropriate the ideas and make a product so unique that it redefines the market around it. This is stealing the idea rather than merely copying it.
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.
It is kinda astounding how often people use this quote and seem to think it means the opposite of what it means.
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.
The distinction (I believe the original quote is Picasso, and the difference is that the great steal while others borrow) is that once you've STOLEN an idea your version is so much better than what you took the whole thing becomes YOURS. Borrowing an idea means that your version ends up simply looking like a lame attempt to copy the older idea, and people prefer the older idea.
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.
>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.
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?
From the video: "And I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, and poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
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."
