Samsung, Lenovo, LG & HP show off copies of Apple TV, MacBooks at CES

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2016
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


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.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 24
    Shameless: image
    edited January 2016 sockrolidgtrjahbladextacee1990nolamacguyanantksundaramSpamSandwichiqatedolamboaudi4cornchip
  • Reply 2 of 24
    sockrolidsockrolid Posts: 2,789member
    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. 

    I wonder how much CES floor space is occupied by makers of iPhone and iPad cases and accessories.
    Maybe 25%?  30%?
    xtacee1990cornchipicoco3palomineairmanchairman
  • Reply 3 of 24
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member
    As has been mentioned in past years, Apple doesn’t attend or exhibit at CES but completely dominates it none the less. True.
    iqatedocornchipAustinCablelostkiwiicoco3magman1979palomine
  • Reply 5 of 24
    Ironic that all these 'competitors' (as well as Apple haters) talk like they really want Apple out of business. But if that really happened, where would refreshing new products come from?
    jahbladextacee1990igrouchoradarthekatAustinCablecityguidelostkiwibrucemcmagman1979palomine
  • Reply 6 of 24
    boltsfan17boltsfan17 Posts: 2,294member
    Seriously Samsung? This is getting beyond pathetic. 


    xtacee1990cornchipicoco3magman1979palomine
  • Reply 7 of 24
    frank777frank777 Posts: 5,839member
    How great would it be if Apple debuted a completely new design for the MacBook Pro next week?

    Making all the copycats obsolete before they even hit the market. Priceless.
    xtacee1990cornchipAustinCablelostkiwimagman1979palomineairmanchairman
  • Reply 8 of 24
    fallenjtfallenjt Posts: 4,053member
    frank777 said:
    How great would it be if Apple debuted a completely new design for the MacBook Pro next week?

    Making all the copycats obsolete before they even hit the market. Priceless.
    Copycats will redesign their products immediately and release them as productions with excuse that what's shown in CES was just a concept. Yup, fucking shame to all Asian companies and Swiss watch maker too!
    lostkiwipalomine
  • Reply 9 of 24
    C'mon people, China and Korea, with their communist mentalities, see no wrong in stealing IP! So what you call "shameless copying", they see as their birthright. Nevertheless, with a global economy, you'd think they'd at least market their rip-offs differently — but no, not even that. Can you imagine the bucks they perceive they save in their thievery? However, in the cellphone market alone, Apple reaped 94% of ALL the profits regardless. The irony of a culture that is intellectually far above average should be able to innovate, and they are not lazy, so my mind can't wrap itself around their motives.
    radarthekatcornchippalomine
  • Reply 10 of 24
    they can copy as much as they want, if their products run windows or android it's a no buy.
    radarthekatcornchipAustinCablelostkiwityler allen86magman1979palomine
  • Reply 11 of 24
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    C'mon people, China and Korea, with their communist mentalities, see no wrong in stealing IP! So what you call "shameless copying", they see as their birthright. Nevertheless, with a global economy, you'd think they'd at least market their rip-offs differently — but no, not even that. Can you imagine the bucks they perceive they save in their thievery? However, in the cellphone market alone, Apple reaped 94% of ALL the profits regardless. The irony of a culture that is intellectually far above average should be able to innovate, and they are not lazy, so my mind can't wrap itself around their motives.
    South Korea is not a Communist nation, but the chaebols certainly have too much influence with their government... come to think of it, our corporatist government (since the 1950's) has gone pretty much in the same direction.
    lostkiwimagman1979palominebigpics
  • Reply 12 of 24
    jungmarkjungmark Posts: 6,926member
    This is ridiculous. Why can't these scum suckers come up with an original idea?! 
    cornchipAustinCablelostkiwimagman1979
  • Reply 13 of 24
    entropysentropys Posts: 4,152member
    So where is Apple's CES upstage this year? How about new MBAs this weekend? With a price drop. Or a wireless HomeKit/network storage iTunes and time machine server built into a higher spec Apple TV.
    edited January 2016 cornchippalomine
  • Reply 14 of 24
    Shameless: image
    They don't care about name calling and shaming. As long as they are not being sued, they will copy down to the millimeter. Where they lose is where someone compares the two and says to themselves, "These look the same, but why do I want the shi**y version of it."
    palomine
  • Reply 15 of 24
    I would expect nothing less from Samsh*te but is it really so dire out there that others feel compelled to follow their lead. No wonder Apple doesn't go to CES or maybe they are not allowed to as it would soon become clear how far the rest of the consumer electronics companies are behind. 
    palomine
  • Reply 16 of 24
    croprcropr Posts: 1,122member
    Seriously Samsung? This is getting beyond pathetic. 


    Bullocks. 

    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 

    singularity
  • Reply 17 of 24
    Everyone needs to take a chill pill. Samsung's 2016 Tizen UI is the evolution of last year's UI. Their TVs are awesome and you've obviously never used one. Not everything revolves around Apple, ladies and gents. https://macnn.mnmcdn.com/article_images/1420198182-md-samsungtizensmarttv1.jpg
  • Reply 18 of 24
    Hyundella said:
    Everyone needs to take a chill pill. Samsung's 2016 Tizen UI is the evolution of last year's UI. Their TVs are awesome and you've obviously never used one. Not everything revolves around Apple, ladies and gents. https://macnn.mnmcdn.com/article_images/1420198182-md-samsungtizensmarttv1.jpg
    Everything actually does.
    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!

    magman1979
  • Reply 19 of 24
    entropysentropys Posts: 4,152member
    Oooh, astroturfers.
  • Reply 20 of 24
    mr. memr. me Posts: 3,221member
    Hyundella said:
    Everyone needs to take a chill pill. Samsung's 2016 Tizen UI is the evolution of last year's UI. Their TVs are awesome and you've obviously never used one. Not everything revolves around Apple, ladies and gents. https://macnn.mnmcdn.com/article_images/1420198182-md-samsungtizensmarttv1.jpg
    I own two Samsung TVs--one a 4K SmartTV; the other, a 2005 era 720p HDTV. I also own an TV 4. I love them all. My Samsung SmartTV has the same UI as shown in the posted JPEG. It is disingenuous to claim that Samsung's current UI is an evolution of last year's UI. Samsung didn't get into the business of smart tvs last year. It has sold them for several years now. Samsung's original SmartTV UI was pretty much a straight crib from the iPhone UI. It did not evolve from last year's UI; it evolved from the iPhone UI.
    icoco3palomine
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