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Originally Posted by
Apple ][ 
There are way too many examples to give, surely most people have seen a bunch of the nearly identical looking ripoff products already, but I'll just post one of the recent ones that I saw.
This has nothing to do with rectangles, Apple patenting a square or any of the other stupid jokes that certain misinformed people and demented Fandroids like to make. It has to do with the talentless people who made this ripoff. Their intention was clearly to deliberately rip off the Macbook Air's design when they were making this design.
That does look like kind of a ripoff, even though I hate the one angle thing as it's often misleading. I've mentioned before that it would be interesting to hear from someone with some amount of background in patent law. In terms of design patents and trade dress, you need some method of testing both validity and infringement. We've all read about Samsung's lawyers being asked to tell the two tablets apart. I'd like to know more about how a company goes about proving infringement on a design. Without standards for proving it, you can reach out pretty far building an imaginary wall around anything with any remote resemblance. There has been little discussion over key points of what makes the design other than fuzzy look and feel type comments that are difficult to quantify or even identify without extensive first hand use. I've mentioned the example of the F700 before for a reason. It was one of the closest things of its time to the iphone. They came out around the same time. The F700 had a touch screen implementation that did not require a stylus, but it also had a built in keyboard. Doing a side by side on the internet could display it without the keyboard out making the two look more alike (keep in mind I don't care which side of the argument whatever jpeg supports). Anyway it would be interesting to know more about this as these laws and things like copying are never as clear as you might think when examined in great detail. If there wasn't much to understand, there would be no reason for a firm to allocate more than a single lawyer to the case, maybe two just to be safe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
SolipsismX
@ Apple ][
That me a long time to realize that is not a MBA. Who makes that? Samsung?
It seemed immediately obvious to me. Whether those are actually spacers or holes, I did not recall them on the MBA. I also recalled a different camera design. Why assume everything is Samsung?
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Originally Posted by
Apple ][ Yes, you're absolutely right. An image was labelled wrong on Google search.
I'm going to go hunt for a few more Mac clones.
That is pretty funny.
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Originally Posted by
Apple ][ I found another clone, and I doubled checked it this time, and this is definitely not an actual Apple device.
This has a cheaper look to it. It might be the photo (although you could make this as a render). I see somewhat of a seam on the trackpad toward the bottom. This is presumably the older style (well, the mac never had separate ones) of right and left click trackpad buttons. I find a lot of this to be quite silly. If they're going to compete on something, why not design around the engineering? Apple has the "pretty box" brand image going back many years. No one will dethrone them there. Make something that runs cool and silent instead and hit a nice price point with it. Design something for strong reliability to minimize warranty costs. It's possible that I'm ignorant on some of what goes into design past the point of reference art and initial mockup renders, but both obvious and non obvious things exist. It seems obvious to include usb ports, a trackpad, a device that allows for functional typing, etc. There's a tendency to play it safe if you can't command huge margins. Many oems do not wish to stand out in a bad way when it comes to tech blog reviews, and many of those have panned some reasonably good designs, especially those from smaller companies that lacked the economy of scale. I don't think it's necessary to ape one company or another. I like the way Lenovo went with their take on the ultrabook thing. They did do the trimmed corners and crowned surfaces. I liked it when they didn't taper things here http://www.laptopspec.net/2011/09/lenovo-ideapad-u300s-ultrabook-u300-and-u400-laptops/ Their recent use of chiclet keyboards to fit in has drawn some negative attention. Anyway I always felt the tapered design was a little gimmicky in that it imposed a lot of limitations on ports to thin out a portion of the machine. I like the rMBP better in this regard, although I'm sad about ethernet. Eventually seeing 10G ethernet would have been nice, although I'm surprised we haven't read about more R&D from Apple on short range wireless bus implementations. They are still quite flawed, but a big selling point would be cord minimization especially with mobile devices. Consider that you could eventually drop your macbook pro or ipad in front of that cinema display and elect to have it switch display output to the 27" without plugging anything in. Research actually goes back a few years on wireless usb and wireless displayport, but they don't seem to have improved in stability just yet to the point where any would make their way into consumer products. It's more that published standards exist. Anyway I'm trailing off topic here.
