HP Explains Why It Copies Apple’s Designs

Apple has a unique design language incorporated into its products, thanks to lead designer and company VP Sir Jonathan Ive. Or at least they did. While Ive’s unique design language still is embedded in the company’s DNA, it is no longer unique, as everyone and their mother scrambles to copy the look and feel of the Macbook, iPhone and iPad.

The most famous imitator is, of course, Samsung (also known sardonically as SamEsung, due to its blatant ripping off of Ive’s work), which is now embroiled in lawsuits with Apple around the Globe. Just look at a Galaxy phone or Tablet and see if you can tell it apart from Apple’s offerings.

However, HP has also jumped on the copy-Apple bandwagon and has hewed very closely to the look of Cupertino’s products in its laptop and ultrabook lines.

Best examples? The Envy Spectre XT Ultrabook, whose wedge shape and metal casing are a carbon copy of the Macbook Air, the thin and light that started the whole Ultrabook trend and the HP Envy 15, which looks almost exactly like a Macbook Pro. The Envy’s slot loading DVD drive, backlit chiclet keyboard in black which contrasts with the unoriginal laptop’s metal body and the black glass bezel around the glass screen, make this laptop less of a derivative work and more of a xerox of Apple’s Pro series laptops.

Or, as Engadget put it, “HP’s latest 15-incher is the most flagrant Mac imitation we’ve seen in some time, and the resemblance is close enough that you could, at first glance, mistake the interior for an MBP.”

Trying to distinguish his company’s offerings from those of Sir Jonny, VP of Industrial Design Stacy Wolff stated that “there are similarities in a way, not due to Apple but due to the way technologies developed. Apple may like to think that they own silver, but they don’t. In no way did HP try to mimic Apple. In life there are a lot of similarities.”

Continuing in this vein, Wolff said that:

The thing is that you have to design what’s right, and that is that sometimes the wedge is the right solution, silver is the right solution. I see a lot of differences as much as the similarities. I think anybody that’s close enough to the business sees that there are differences in the design. Ours is rubber-coated at the bottom. We use magnesium; they didn’t do that — they use CNC aluminum. We did a brush pattern on our product; they didn’t. We did a different kind of keyboard execution. We did audio as a component; they didn’t. So there are a lot of things I can list off that are differences; but if you want to look at a macro level, there are a lot of similarities to everything in the market that’s an Ultrabook today. It is not because those guys did it first; it’s just that’s where the form factor is leading it.

Further on in his interview with Engadget, Wolff continued to dig himself into a hole of his own making, responding to a question about HP computers with black chiclet keyboards on silver colored computers that:

“We did that before they did, but no one gave us credit. It’s one of those things. You go back a few years and you start to look at what we did during the Pavilion stages, a long time ago when we started to do that. Even the chiclet, right? In the mid-80s we did a chiclet keyboard, but did anybody give us credit? No.”

Wolff then accused Apple of basing the iPad off of designs from HP’s TC1000 tablet, which doesn’t look much like an Apple tablet at all.

Way to stay classy HP!