Well if they during the copying lowered the price and added USB3, VGA and HDMI out and choice of beefier CPUs and GPUs, I don't see how anybody can complain :)
I used to be into high end audio, and spent rather large sums acquiring great looking machines. When apple first came out with their brushed metal cases, I assumed that Apple had simply copied luxury audio manufacturers of the day.
I still don't know why other computer companies don't try and design beautiful machines that have minimalistic design principles.
Yes. It is a safe to say that Jonathan Ive has studied the work of Dieter Rams. When it comes to industrial design, Dieter Rams is one of the greats. There is nothing wrong with being inspired by him. It is important to note that this inspiration goes beyond the industrial design of Apple's hardware. For example, it is widely agreed that the iPhone's calculator app is based on the Braun ET66 calculator, designed Rams: http://barryborsboom.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/172_721-ram...
The calculator app doesn't look like that now, though, even though it's clearly inspired by it. I believe I have seen that design on the iPhone before, but when I bought my 3G two years ago, I believe the buttons were square and the '='-button was bigger. Did it look like that in the original iPhone?
It's interesting to see the different ways that people respond to design.
When I look at that laptop I immediately think "MacBook". Then as I look at it more some of the details don't seem quite right and it becomes obvious that it is not a MacBook, but probably a copy of one.
Other's that I have talked to about this though don't see anything but the faintest resemblance to a MacBook. I suppose it's all a matter of perspective.
Apple seems to have been the first to use a unibody metal design specifically for a laptop. Since Apple did it first, HP could be considered to have copied by some people.
Then again Porsche Design did the same thing for mobile phones years before Apple or any other consumer electronics company did - my personal opinion is that Porsche did most of the innovation in this area.
It's been a long time since I last saw one, I don't even know if they're still being made, but I recall the case being milled out of a chunk of magnesium alloy.
They're made out of magnesium and are multi-part. The trick is they make the internals somewhat waterproof (at least water passes through quickly) and suspend the entire mobo on rubber shocks.
Which model? Did Vaio later revert back something more conventional? As of 2007 Apple was using the same layout they have now and Vaio was using a fairly mundane PC laptop configuration. Side-by-side: http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/19478.jpg
Or is there some feature in particular that was copied that I'm not seeing?
Will all of the hardware features function properly in a unix (or unix-like) OS? That's the apple laptop feature I'd like to see their competitors copy.
It was shaky for a while, but yes. I run Ubuntu 10.04 on an Envy 15 and it works well. The two caveats are that kernel 2.6.33+ is necessary for patches related to the BIOS and ACPI, and a patch to synaptics drivers is necessary if you want the touchpad to work properly.
That's better than I've seen. What I'd be after to complete that is some sort of confidence that I'd be able to upgrade and have things continue to work. I've had the experience a lot of going to great effort to get something to work.. and then doing a kernel upgrade and having stuff break again.
Very few companies make the effort to provide linux drivers for their laptops. That made me buy a mac in the first place. It would be nice if some distro were backed up by a hardware company and feature a "bootcamp-like" easy way to install windows afterwards...
> Very few companies make the effort to provide linux drivers for their laptops
I am sure the threat of dropping out of some "incentive" program that ensures lower prices for Windows OEM licenses is enough to prevent many manufacturers from providing adequate Linux support.
As for the bootcamp thingie, I've seen Windows ruin my Linux boots more times than I can count. I am not sure it is considered a bug or a feature.
Back in the Vista beta process (I was a beta tester) I filed a bug complaining about having to rebuild my lilo boot after installing Vista, but, AFAIK, it was never fixed.
I must assume, therefore, it's considered a feature.
Not sure if this is still the case, but with the hp laptops I own (especially ugly with the small HP mini's) the laptops looks good but they add the HUGE ugly power adapters.
With my hp mini the adapter is like 3/4th the size of the laptop itself. It's those details (a pretty big one in this case) that makes Apple products so good.
Apple's MagSafe is awesome.
Apple used to have really, really big power adapters, too. The one for my Mac Mini (G4) is enormous. The one for my MacBook is not especially tiny, but it is OK. YMMV.
That's only the case for the Mac Mini and the G4 Cube - Apple's portable power adapters of that era are pretty much exactly the same as they are now (excluding the fancy MagSafe connector, of course).
I have both a 2004 model iBook (pre-intel) and a brand new 2010 MacBook Pro and the adapters look the same.
I have the Envy 13t. It comes with an extended battery that fits over the whole bottom of the computer. There's a pic in that engagdet article (http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2009/10/hp-env...). This makes the battery life for me more like 8-10hr and you can't even tell the battery is on there, i.e. its flush.
No optical drive but I literally never use CDs so I don't care. The trackpad doesn't bother me that much. I'd say it isn't the greatest, but its multi-touch and works fine.
It's also quiet and fast. Not sure how much of that (if any) is due to the SSD or my other particular specs.
• Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo SL9600(2.13GHz, 6MB L2 Cache)w/512MB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 4330 Graphics
• 3GB DDR3 System Memory (1 Dimm)
I don't really care how many PC manufacturers try and copy the MacBook Pro, but why has no so far managed to make a decent unibody PC laptop? IMO that is the real desirable feature of a MacBook.
By trying to make a product too similar to an Apple product a manufacturer would open the door wide open to valid criticism about being an Apple knockoff company. By doing something different, they have claim to their own identity. But since (almost) nobody can beat Apple at design, that difference manifests itself more in getting more performance per doller (=cheap construction) or lots of products with special features (e.g. gaming machines).
Also it takes time to develop mass production capacity for something with a very different manufacturing process.
Why'd they wait until now to start copying Apple's design? We're well past the all-metal laptops that were the height of Apple's design prowess. I bought the first model of PB17 purely on design, even though it was only about as fast as an Intel-based laptop I'd had for a year and a half. But after an iteration or two of improvement, they threw that design sensibility away to go with plasticky stuff. ;)
The old models were horrible. No optical drive on a 15" laptop and the software used for the trackpad was horrible. It looks like they remedied the optical drive issue, I'd have to see if the trackpads work better now.
