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Comment by nullcipher | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if he actually said that but isn't all innovation incremental? I understand he put his heart and soul into it, but there has been tons of people who have worked equally hard before him to get to where he got (Apple itself copied it's UI from Xerox). Apple has also blatantly copied and consumed many companies in the past.

There is so much code copied around these days. This is all just the way it is and how we have decided to move ahead as a society. Making judgments on others is uncalled for.

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> I don't know if he actually said that but isn't all innovation incremental?

He said exactly that: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/tech/2014/10/jony-ive-lessons...

And yes innovation is incremental but this is Xiaomi not simply borrowing design cues but literally cloning a design. See for yourself - here's their take on Japanese company Balmuda's air purifier: https://www.balmuda.com/jp/airengine/

Xiaomi's version: http://www.mi.com/en/air/

Other than the white color, they actually look different to me. That said, I can show you two editors which look completely alike. I hope you feel the same about them.

Imagine if I said: Atom is such a rip off and the sublime guy must be feeling that GitHub is lazy and a thief. I wonder if GitHub compensated the sublime author who is a small indie dev!

http://cache.filehippo.com/img/ex/2794__Sublime_text_2_1.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9QBldnFnock/U3PgeKnq-SI/AAAAAAAASt...

> Imagine if I said: Atom is such a rip off and the sublime guy must be feeling that GitHub is lazy and a thief.

Edit: my original comment wasn't very constructive.

My issue with the analogy is that Xiaomi openly copies the design of competing products that have gained success, at least in part, due to having differentiated designs. Usually they copy without providing even incremental innovation or product differentiation.

In the case of Sublime Text vs. Atom, GitHub developed an editor with a fundamentally different underlying architecture. Github also made Atom open source, which addressed one of the main complaints against Sublime Text. Atom offered obvious and non-trivial product differentiation.

Also, Xiaomi specifically targets products that have distinctive designs. Sublime Text's design doesn't look that distinctive. What are the components of the design (excluding configurable parameters like a light/dark theme) that Atom copied? The main similarity I see are the tabs, but neither look distinct from most other tabs (i.e., Chrome browser tabs).

Parent comment gave screenshots and claimed things are copied. I am also giving two screenshots and telling you that those are copied. What is the point I am missing?

Looks like Balmuda (original designer of the air purifier) is claiming the same:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2858592/xiaomi-faces-copycat-...

We're talking about the Jony Ive who designs rectangles?

Meh. Him and Apple have stolen plenty! Isn't Steve Jobs famously quoted as saying "great artists steal"?

Anyway, what's the fucking difference if you steal a few pieces here and there or the whole thing? Nothing.

(EDIT: A piece of something is still a whole piece that you've stolen. And Apple has also stolen entire apps, like Konfabulator. They get no sympathy from me.)

Apple literally redefined what a smart phone is. While he borrowed design cues from history, Braun in particular, applying that to the phone space and coming up with a design language that had durability was a big breakthrough.

Remember in 2006 Nokia, Motorola, RIM and others made literally everything but rectangular phones. They were covered in buttons and other crap.

Ive's vision of a virtually button free phone was strikingly different at the time, a device even simpler than the Star Trek communicator pad.

>Anyway, what's the fucking difference if you steal a few pieces here and there or the whole thing? Nothing.

It's very hard to strip something down to the essential components and integrate those into a package that becomes obvious in retrospect. The steering wheel in a car, the magnetic seal on a refrigerator door, these are all obvious now but at the time were huge breakthroughs.

If you can't see the difference between copying and working to reduce something down to the fundamentals you're obviously unaware of how one is lazy and the other is crazy hard.

The Sony Ericsson P800/P900/P910 had a removable keypad making them effectively rectangular phones. The Neonode N1 had a touch driven interface, including the slide to unlock feature. Then there were PDAs like Sony Clie PEG-TH55. All this a couple of years before the iPhone.

The reason phones didn't look like rectangles wasn't because no one had the idea, but because screens were expensive and touch technology (and other technologies like data) wasn't mature yet. That's why you had something like the LG Prada come out at the same time (or even slightly before) the iPhone.

Just because you are first to adopt something (e.g. because your customers don't mind paying a premium and you've secretly developed it for years including controlling the supply chain) doesn't mean you should have the sole right to use a concept derived from evolution of components.

P910 http://pdadb.net/img/sony_ericsson_p910.jpg

Neonode N1 http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/Neonode_N1_Sept_2004.jpg

Sony Clie PEG-TH55 https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2010/08/03/b26d3392-67c...

LG Prada http://image.cellphones.ca/images/phones/74/767/lg-prada-ful...

This post should be marked as reference anytime some Apple-zealot brings the "Apple invented everything under the sun" argument.

Don't get me wrong: Apple deservingly got tons of credits (literally, in their bank accounts) for the combination of great hardware/software/ui design/marketing of the past 10 years. They still do.

But their success means that just like Jony Ive got "inspired" by Braun, Apple is not inspiring everybody else.

I use air-quotes on inspired because while it's obvious in hind-sight the way the Braun styling was adapted, distilling the design language of a blender or a pocket calculator made in the 1960s into a cutting edge product launched in the mid 2000s is not exactly a straight-forward exercise.

If you look at the mock-ups people made of the hypothetical and long-rumored "iPod phone" that Apple was working on you'll see how many of the design decisions Apple took were completely unexpected: https://www.engadget.com/2009/12/28/how-early-iphone-predict...

Apple didn't invent everything under the sun, and they didn't even "invent" everything they use. What they do is try hard to come up with a striking, simple design that they know will differentiate their products. They also get very upset when people steal their design without even trying to make it their own.

Notice how Apple's been quiet about the Microsoft Surface device, and even though it directly competes with the iPad, they're still partnering with Microsoft to build Office apps. I think they respect Microsoft here because re-inventing the tablet and making a compelling notebook product of that sort takes a lot of bold engineering.

Apple's appropriation of the keyboard cover (http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/9/9297805/apple-ipad-pro-micr...) is one of those things that's inevitable. I'm not sure what else they could have done here, they were boxed in, so it ends up being 'theft' by some definition of that term. Microsoft doesn't seem to have raised this as an issue, so I'm sure there was some communication here between the two parties to make sure it didn't poison the waters.

It's stylistic exercise which may be (or not be) enabled by technological advances but it's no different than when 80s cloths coming back now. Understand that I'm not saying it's trivial to accomplish this exercise. Specially to achieve global cultural icon status. But I'm arguing that part of journey to achieve that status requires other's following your lead.

Xiaomi "thin, machine-metal" laptop looks as much like an Macbook as iPhone's 6 antenna lines look like HTC One M7.

Apple has been quiet about Microsoft (and vice-versa) because if Samsung v Apple design patent wars taught us anything is that it's pointless and expensive to engage in these fights.

Of those only the Prada is close, and even then the similarities are very superficial: http://gizmodo.com/261172/settling-this-iphone-vs-lg-prada-n...

Since it was released so close to the launch of the iPhone that it's not like Apple could have possibly dropped everything and rebuilt their entire design strategy around it. The protracted lawsuit with Samsung showed how Apple had been working on that design for some time and had already settled on a number of key design elements, the "rectangle" being one.

Those are interesting historical artifacts, but none of those had any lasting impact on the market, they were merely historical curiosities that nobody ever copied.

> Just because you are first to adopt something...

No, it doesn't give you an exclusive right per-se, but there's a lot of ways you can make a touch-screen phone short of copying Apple's design millimeter for millimeter like Samsung did.

So long as there's such a thing as a design patent then, legally speaking, yes, you do have the sole right. That's what patents are for. I'm generally not a fan of patents, but you can't argue that they don't exist.

There was incredible variety in the phone space prior to the iPhone, phones came in all shapes and sizes with vendors exploring increasingly implausible formats out of desperation. Post-iPhone they all converged, coincidentally I'm sure, on Apple's design. It's only now we're seeing some divergence from that.

Today we're seeing the same ridiculous convergence with keyboards where everyone plus dog is using the Apple layout. This hurts consumers since there's far little choice than there was before.

There's a huge difference between "copying" meaning "taking a good idea and giving it your own spin and making it even better" (e.g. Android vs iOS) and "copying" meaning "making a shitty knock-off version of a thing that looks almost identical to the other thing superficially", as in all the bargain-priced knock-off phones that are sold using Apple's branding (http://mashable.com/2016/06/17/apple-china-knockoffs/#qO0bF3...). Most companies fall in the middle here, but some skew very close to the bottom.

Not only did you completely miss the point, you changed your whole argument when the facts didn't suit your views anymore. Phone look like they do because of the state of technology. I don't know why this is hard to understand?

"Of those only the Prada is close"

No, the P900 was a smart phone and therefor a rectangular phone like the iPhone, but with a hardware keyboard in addition to the virtual one since touch technology wasn't very good. The Neonode had a touch interface because they had developed their own touch technology. The Sony PDA has a very similar design since it was made for using applications similar to what would later become common with phones when larger screen and faster processors became available. The LG Prada was also a premium phone, which is why it could look similar to an iPhone.

"they were merely historical curiosities that nobody ever copied."

Except Apple then I guess.

"There was incredible variety in the phone space prior to the iPhone"

Not really. Most phones looked largely the same with a keypad and maybe a joystick, because that was the state of technology at the time. Just like most phones look the same today, because of the state of technology today. Even if you wanted to make a different phone today there wouldn't be much point. Because you would have to create your own parts, your own operating system and your own application ecosystem just to be 99% similar to everyone else since you're using the same technology. Look how things went for Google Glass, which isn't surprising since the technology isn't ready.

"Today we're seeing the same ridiculous convergence with keyboards where everyone plus dog is using the Apple layout."

Do you mean the Sony layout? Because that's where the chiclet design was copied from.

http://www.cnet.com/products/sony-vaio-x505/

"as in all the bargain-priced knock-off phones"

Those are novelty phones, you literally have to search them out to find them. They have about zero percent of the market.

I'm not sure how re-inventing the form factor of the phone in combination with an aggressively touch-friendly operating system is "copying". That Apple abandoned hardware buttons almost completely had a lot of people reeling. They hated it.

By that definition the Ford F-150 is a copy of the Porsche 911. I mean they both have four wheels and an engine and things like door handles and windows.

The Sony x505 has "chiclet" keys, but they didn't invent them. These things were on calculators decades prior, and infamously the IBM PC Jr.'s wireless keyboard.

What I'm talking about is the peculiar arrangement of the arrow keys and other subtle things that are very distinctly Apple. Given how quirky some keyboards can be, where seemingly every vendor has their own spin on how big the Caps Lock key should be or where backspace should be positioned, they're all using Apple's keyboard as a blueprint going forward, literally copying it.

Apple's fairly unique arrow key layout showed up in early versions of the iBook and other Apple machines in the 2000-2001 era, possibly earlier.

At this point I can only conclude that you don't want to understand. I've already explained that there were a number of manufacturers who had a vision of a smart phone with a similar form factor to the iPhone. Steve Jobs was a fan of Sony, he wanted to run Mac OS on the VAIO line of laptops. As that didn't work out, he ultimately made his own slim aluminium laptop with chiclet keyboard. Richard Howarth who was involved in designing both the iPhone and the MacBook Air had previously worked at Sony. Before Apple adopted the Sony style their products were plastic and/or colorful.

Apple has always copied, just like they copied much of the current iPhone user interface from their competitors.

I had a P-800. I can tell you the iPhone experience was much more than the screen. It was swipe, multi-touch, the smooth animation, the attention to designing applications down to their icons.

The iPhone redefined what a smartphone should be using nothing that wasn't available to anyone else in the market. Except, perhaps, a Jony Ive with a mad man like Steve Jobs pushing him.

That said, the unibody MacBooks set the gold standard for stylish laptops. It's natural someone else would follow the formula many years later. Even with only evolutionary changes, the MacBook is still light years apart from its Windows-running copycats.

Of course, the P800 was a couple of years before the iPhone. The point is that a P800 with five year more modern components would look similar to an iPhone. The first iPhone was actually pretty crappy by today's standards. No GPS, MMS, 3G, appstore, teathering or iTunes sync IIRC. Because they were breaking into the market before the technology was ready. Similarly to Tesla now, which is why their cars will be expensive and crappy by tomorrow's standard for things like autonomous driving.

"good artists copy, great artists steal"

This quote is meant to make you think about the differences between stealing and copying ideas. It isn't literal. It doesn't even make sense literally. Stealing means you make it yours. It is no longer theirs. How do you do that with an idea? You make it so much better that people forget about the previous idea you took.

I really this interpretation. Made me look at it in a whole new way.

How many different designs can one really come up with for a space efficient air purifier anyways?

Imagine if someone complained because a tire manufacturer came out with a gasp round wheel.

Apple's UI and the UI from the Alto are while conceptually similar (insomuch as any two cars are conceptually similar), not even in the same family, in look, feel or user interaction - its a bit like comparing a Model T with a 39 Ford - while both are cars, the controls work in pretty dissimilar manners.

Alto: http://s7.computerhistory.org/is/image/CHM/500004657-03-01?$...

Lisa: http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/apple-lisa2xl/ap...

Mac System 1: http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/images/screenshots/syst...

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