Samsung, Lenovo, LG & HP show off copies of Apple TV, MacBooks at CES
CES wouldn't be the Consumer Electronics Show without a little Copycat, Emulate & Steal. This year's event showed off some of the tech industry's best ideas on how to make products that look as much as possible like Apple's as they attempt to transition from selling cheap commodity products to premium hardware that struggles to look designed in Cupertino.
Intel inspired by MacBooks, four years ago at CES. Nothing much has changed since
Ever since Apple released the MacBook Air, Intel's Ultrabook partners have been trying to crank out their own lookalikes that tiptoe toward flattery with their careful attention to copying every design cue they can, as we previously noted at CES 2012.
Lenovo, the Chinese firm that bought IBM's PC business and more recently took over Google's struggling Motorola Mobility subsidiary, has doubled down on its portrayal of itself as a shadow of Apple in marketing photos that depict its laptops arranged exactly the way Apple portrayed its super thin new MacBook last spring.
"Can you spot the difference?" tweeted Neil Cybart.
LG and HP similarly introduced their own MacBook copies, with the LG Gram 15 (below left) taking Apple's design to a 15 inch screen in the same rose gold finish introduced by Apple last year. The new machine runs Windows 10 and sports more ports, but also claims only 7 hours of battery life despite being larger.
HP's EliteBook Folio (above right) also introduced another Apple-inspired notebook design for CES 2016, hoping to upgrade its Windows PC customers used to paying on average around $300 to a high end MacBook alternative priced more like Apple at $999. HP has also tried to extricate itself from the cheap Android tablet business, and hopes buyers will return willing to pay more for tablets running Windows.
Samsung is so familiar with studying Apple that it literally wrote a book (for internal use only) on how to examine Apple's work and then duplicate it down to the dot.
However, after its iPhone copycat manual appeared in the Samsung infringement trial, the firm was left on the hook for paying $548 million, followed by a second jury award of $120 million, in two cases that accomplished little more than establishing, very publicly, how desperately Samsung looks to Apple for direction in the design of its smartphone and tablets.
After all that embarrassment, you'd think Samsung would pursue at least mostly original designs for its other products. But its new TVs at CES were spotted showing off a direct clone of Apple TV 4 and its new tvOS interface, right down to the frosted white overlays and 16:9 channel app icons, as noted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.
As G. Keenan Schneider tweeted, "Samsung's TV interface follows their design guidelines nicely: 'Do exactly what Apple does, but really sh**ty.'
At last year's CES, a Chinese knock-off firm Hyperdon showed off its counterfeit Apple Watch, although reviewers said the device "seemed incomplete and sometimes even useless."
Last year marked 15 years of Apple upstaging CES, a history we recounted as a decade-and-a-half tour of Apple stealing attention from the industry, without even attending their party.
The only way to steal that attention back from Apple seems to be to literally steal Apple's attention.
Intel inspired by MacBooks, four years ago at CES. Nothing much has changed since
Lenovo, LG and HP's dancing MacBooks
Ever since Apple released the MacBook Air, Intel's Ultrabook partners have been trying to crank out their own lookalikes that tiptoe toward flattery with their careful attention to copying every design cue they can, as we previously noted at CES 2012.
Lenovo, the Chinese firm that bought IBM's PC business and more recently took over Google's struggling Motorola Mobility subsidiary, has doubled down on its portrayal of itself as a shadow of Apple in marketing photos that depict its laptops arranged exactly the way Apple portrayed its super thin new MacBook last spring.
"Can you spot the difference?" tweeted Neil Cybart.
Can you spot the difference? pic.twitter.com/7NcJHdoV3a
-- Neil Cybart (@neilcybart)
LG and HP similarly introduced their own MacBook copies, with the LG Gram 15 (below left) taking Apple's design to a 15 inch screen in the same rose gold finish introduced by Apple last year. The new machine runs Windows 10 and sports more ports, but also claims only 7 hours of battery life despite being larger.
HP's EliteBook Folio (above right) also introduced another Apple-inspired notebook design for CES 2016, hoping to upgrade its Windows PC customers used to paying on average around $300 to a high end MacBook alternative priced more like Apple at $999. HP has also tried to extricate itself from the cheap Android tablet business, and hopes buyers will return willing to pay more for tablets running Windows.
Samsung's Apple tvOS
Samsung is so familiar with studying Apple that it literally wrote a book (for internal use only) on how to examine Apple's work and then duplicate it down to the dot.
However, after its iPhone copycat manual appeared in the Samsung infringement trial, the firm was left on the hook for paying $548 million, followed by a second jury award of $120 million, in two cases that accomplished little more than establishing, very publicly, how desperately Samsung looks to Apple for direction in the design of its smartphone and tablets.
After all that embarrassment, you'd think Samsung would pursue at least mostly original designs for its other products. But its new TVs at CES were spotted showing off a direct clone of Apple TV 4 and its new tvOS interface, right down to the frosted white overlays and 16:9 channel app icons, as noted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.
I mean, come the fuck ON. pic.twitter.com/abiZlF2hy6
-- G. Keenan Schneider (@_GKeenan)
As G. Keenan Schneider tweeted, "Samsung's TV interface follows their design guidelines nicely: 'Do exactly what Apple does, but really sh**ty.'
Apple's upstaging of CES
At last year's CES, a Chinese knock-off firm Hyperdon showed off its counterfeit Apple Watch, although reviewers said the device "seemed incomplete and sometimes even useless."
Last year marked 15 years of Apple upstaging CES, a history we recounted as a decade-and-a-half tour of Apple stealing attention from the industry, without even attending their party.
The only way to steal that attention back from Apple seems to be to literally steal Apple's attention.
Comments
I wonder how much CES floor space is occupied by makers of iPhone and iPad cases and accessories.
Maybe 25%? 30%?
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-h-moser-and-cie-swiss-alp-watch-a-not-so-subtle-jab-at-the-apple-watch/
Making all the copycats obsolete before they even hit the market. Priceless.
Apple TV is settopbox, misleadingly called TV. Samsung SmartTV is a real TV with real 4K. In case of TVs, Samsung is a few years ahead of Apple, it has been selling TV and smart TVs for a very long time. The user interface you see, is just a normal evolution of an existing Samsung product. The initial release of the product existed long before Apple released version 1 of the Apple TV.
It is not because Samsung copied the iPhone, that it copied the Apple TV interface. If there is one company that can be granted the copycat award for TV interfaces, it should be Apple not Samsung. But of course such a message it not well received in the AI community
1. Samsung has already come out publicly saying 2016 would be a rough year for investors. Not directly naming Apple, but citing one of their key partners would be using less Samsung internals in their devices.
2. True, Tizen is coming a long way. It is better, or soon to be better than stock android. Both (Linux based) are better than anything Windows, but they all can't touch Apple's Systems. Apple's BSD/Darwin based systems truly out class them. From the XNU kernel, Cocoa APIs, etc...
3. Xcode development platform is far more polished than anything anyone else has. Swifts progression is not something to be ignored.
4. The ecosystem! The trump card! Make no mistake, Apple is an ecosystem company. When samsung fine tunes Tizen OS half as much as Apple has Darwin (to runs on desk/laptops, flagship phones/tablets, & not just a limited a number of watches and tvs), then you still be off. As they'd still need to develop a solid development platform, programming language, respectable size App Store not reliant on Google.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's been a one horse race for years already!