Yesterday, former Google-executive Hugo Barra, now Xiaomi’s global vice president, had a talk with The Verge.
Barra is only a year into his job as leader of Mi’s internationalization efforts, but he’s already “sick and tired” of hearing his company derided as an Apple copycat. He sees Mi as “an incredibly innovative company” that never stops trying to improve and refine its designs, and the allegations of it copying Apple are “sweeping sensationalist statements because they have nothing better to talk about.”
Scroll down on the Mi 3 “features” page and you’ll see this image, named “detail-camera.jpg”. Take a good look at the camera in that image, then look at the app icon for the current version of Aperture. It’s a simple copy-paste-skew job of the lens, and not a very good one. Two panels down on the page, they use it again, horizontally flipped. (Shockingly, they cropped out the “Designed by Apple in California”.)
Hilarious.
Looks like graphic designers on both companies googled for free camera lens image and used the first one that came up:
http://www.freevector.com/camera-lens/
The date on that one seems to be 15/07/11, so it isn’t copied from the Apple icon.
Edited 2014-07-23 08:36 UTC
The Aperture icon dates back to 2005.
In that case, who ever made that free image probably ripped off Aperture icon. Since the quote specifically mentions current version of Aperture, I assumed that the Aperture icon has been recently changed.
Still, I claim that the rip-off in this case is accidental. Every nondescript image Apple uses somewhere probably has been recreated dozens of times and shoved into these free image repositories.
I appreciate your “nondescript” thrown in there (/sarcasm… when many of us can spot this from across the room — I love how geeks will claim any image of a lens is the same as any image of a lens, despite the highly distinct features), but this actually proves the point — even if we assume your theory is correct, which it probably is not. Yes, Apple creates a distinct design, it gets ripped of — or to please you: people are “inspired” by it, so they copy it, and modify it slightly. Then everyone uses it. That’s not really saying anything in XiaoMi’s favor and is your best case defense (they accidentally used it when repurposing someone else’s work, not producing their own.)
The point is: XiaoMi can’t even produce original 3d product renders of their own products… or even outsource it properly to someone else. Their own 3D renders are actually cut and past jobs of other people’s 2D assets that, at best, are being assembled by people who can’t recognize highly recognizable symbology within their own industry. That speaks poorly of XiaoMi at best and points to them as hypocrites, liars, cheats, and poor designers at worst.
Edited 2014-07-23 16:00 UTC
Maybe by not wasting time on renders of their products they’re able to offer them at a lower price point.
Good for them. I’d rather have a good product than a good webpage for that product
For your information, many (if not most) images given for free on such sites are at best inspired from commercial pictures, often copied, and regularly just stolen (the file is purchased once from a stock agency and then illegally distributed on such free images sites).
I know it because I am a contributor to a few stock agencies and I often see commercial pictures stolen on such sites.
And this very specific case is just a funny minor but obvious rip-off. Xiaomi is obviously VERY inspired from Apple to say the least and it becomes difficult to accept it when a top exec strongly denies the obvious.
Edited 2014-07-23 09:10 UTC
For BOTH your info the “colored lens” thing has been around for at least 20 years that I know of, probably longer. I know I remember seeing a similar effect in ads for high end cameras waaay back in the mid 90s, possibly Olympia or Canon but its been too damned long.
Point is Apple invented that like they invented MP3 players…IE all they did was make a “hipster slick” version of an idea old as dirt, SOP for Cupertino.
That was one thing I always gave Jobs credit for, you could have given that man something boring like washer dryer combos and by the time he was done he’d have people lining around the block to pay triple price for the “iClean” and it would look great.
Neither was this
https://twitter.com/sascha_p/statuses/491499901390319616
The shade of black on the T-shirt is definitely different to the shade of black on one worn by Steve Jobs.
Have you even looked at industrial design for the last 50 years? It’s all the same old bland modernist bollocks, and they all learn the same design theories in university.
So you must be pretty f–king desperate to lay claim to a phrase and a t shirts of a certain colour.
Edited 2014-07-23 10:47 UTC
You must be pretty f–king blind and completely lack a sense of humor.
Don’t you think this is risible and if not why not
Black shirt, jeans, one more thing. That’s steve jobs style. Its obvious to any objective viewer.
So? Steve Jobs’ “style” itself is cobbled together from previous (or contemporaneous) styles and so on and so forth.
“GENEALOGY, n. An account of one’s descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.”
Just because you chose not to trace the evolution of a style past a certain individual doesn’t mean it originated from that individual, nor that the individual has ownership of it.
I don’t think you really understand what we’re saying.
The ceo is deliberately trying to look like Steve Jobs. There is no rational debate in this.
So, I’m not debating. I’m telling you that you’re not thinking rationally if you continue to try and debate this.
And I think everyone is assuming what my position is purely based on what “side” of the argument they think I’m on rather than the actual argument I’m making.
He’s copying Steve Jobs.
AND everyone that came before Steve Jobs and did similar things that Steve Jobs copied off. Just because we only remember Steve Jobs doesn’t make him the originator.
Well, ok now you’ve returned to reality.
Go back and read this thread
The whole point of this thread was that the xaomi ceo was deliberately copying Steve Jobs. He didn’t accidentally copy him by any stretch of the imagination.
Maybe you have grown up in an environment that didn’t stigmatize trademarks, where copying a successful style was seen as an obvious thing to do. I don’t know. But any rational person would have to agree that there is a high degree of design language overlap between the two companies products. Much more so than other companies in the same market, even significantly more than Samsung prior to the Apple-Samsung lawsuit.
If you haven’t look at this
http://www.cultofandroid.com/66569/xiaomi-dont-copy-apple/
No, I was already there. People assuming my position based on what side they think I’m on doesn’t make me the one out of touch and reality.
YOU go back and reread the thread. I never said it was accidental. I even denied right to Tony Swash’s face that it was a coincidence.
Steve Jobs originally dressed like a typical nerd with no fashion sense. He later adopted the generic black clothing worn by most architects and designers.
Pure coincidence
http://www.cultofandroid.com/66569/xiaomi-dont-copy-apple/
You completely did not understand my point. Apple’s “style” is modernized Japanese minimalism. That is the style of everything for the last 50 years.
Every design student basically learns about minimalism and falls in love with it. It’s not “pure coincidence” that Xiaomi looks like the iPhone, because there’s nothing “coincidental” about everyone learning the same design principles.
What rubbish. They copied a successful design. It’s that simple. They were so lavish, and shameless, in their copying that the whole thing is wildly amusing. I cannot fathom why you are so adamant about denying it.
Do you really think that Xiaomi independently arrived at the same design as the most successful handset just because their design thinking happened to moving in an inevitably parallel fashion? If that’s the case why don’t all phones look just like the iPhone?
You’re not one of those people that think that nobody has ever copied anything Apple has ever done are you? Because that’s just weird.
Here is my prediction. Apple wearables won’t look like the current crop of Android wearables. Two years after the release of the Apple wearables most Android wearables will look like Apple wearables. People like you will claim that’s because the design is obvious and the result of inevitably design processes and is not the result of copying. And so it goes on.
Anyone can look at the evidence and realize I did not say they came up with the same design independently.
Sure they copied Apple. They copied a copy. Of a copy of a copy. It’s copyturtles all the way down. You’re the one stupidly assigning some religious quality to the fact that you only cared to trace the geneaology of modern design back to Apple.
This is one for the ages. An Apple shill finally admitting that not all phones look like the iPhone.
If you copy a copier’s products, are you copying the copier, or copying the line of evolution? It think it’s even more weird to think it all started with Apple. Because that’s what the phrase “copied Apple” implies.
You’re like a technology creationist thinking everything was created in its current form as separate kinds.
Xiaomi’s copy is continuing the trend of minimalist design that is currently lead by Apple but does not solely consist of Apple. No one today looks at an A380 and a 787 and argue about who stole the airliner look.
Here’s my prediction. Apple is going to copy Android. You’re going to pick up on the slightest difference and write a whole industrial design manifesto about the brave new direction Apple is heading in. Then you’ll fudge the dates and start claiming it was Apple who came up with the look in the first place.
More hilarious coincidences for the gullible
From Daring Fireball
[q]Here’s a beautiful photograph of a young girl by Javi Inchusta Gonzalez, posted to Flickr.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/51074875@N06/7005166745/in/gallery-cla…
Note that it was taken with a Nikon D700 SLR, and that its licensing is set to “Copyright, All Rights Reservedâ€.
Now go back to our old friend, the Xiaomi Mi 3 “Features†page. Scroll down to where they show the Android photo gallery app, and look at the first image, labeled as a shot from the device’s camera roll. (Screenshot http://daringfireball.net/misc/2014/07/mi-gallery-rip.jpg
So Xiaomi:
Ripped off a copyright photo. (I’ll eat my hat if they obtained permission to use this photo from Gonzalez.)
Is passing off photos taken with professional SLRs as shots from their phone’s camera.
I wouldn’t be surprised if most or even all the example photos in their gallery are similar ripoffs. [/q[
I already addressed your “coincidence” bollocks. Maybe you want to read up my response, but you’ve already made an ass of yourself.
I don’t see a problem here either. Jobs’s style worked. People liked his speeches and his style and it made him sell a lot of things. If someone is doing something right or better than you then you should learn from him while keep doing what you are doing right. It looks like it’s working great for Xiaomi. I don’t get why people call them for this. Anyway, I’m happy they did because I didn’t know Xiaomi existed and now I do. Maybe it’s Xiaomi itself that is trying to make a controversy over their copycat behaviour in order to raise its brand awareness in the west?
Hilarious because Gruber confuses marketing with technology. Then again, he’s an Apple fan.
That’s not the same image. Similar, I’ll grant you, but the flare details are different.
This one on Shutterstock OTOH, looks like an exact match for the Aperture icon bar the text around the edge: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=63938134&pl=39452-43068
And, given that it’s on a reputable, paid source like Shutterstock, I’d say anyone who had paid for it would feel well within their rights to use it. As well as that, it’s a vector, so it obviously wasn’t a copy and paste job from the Apple icon.
The free vector icon is not the one used in the copied graphic. That image is slightly different.
They have not cropped out any text from the image, although they might have removed it by other means if the Aperture logo truly is the original. Cropping implies that the text would have been at the borders of the image, which it clearly isn’t in the case of the Aperture logo.
Cropping is not the same thing as removing elements from an image.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cropping_%28image%29
Who cares? It’s an icon. As a software developer I copy icons on a daily basis. This is the best way to get people to understand what this icon means. Toolkits have stock icons for the purpose of consistancy. Save icons are floppy disks, because it’s been the standard way since 30 years or so. You don’t want creative icons. When you put an emergency exit sign on a door you want it to look like every other emergency signs. If you try to be creative about it you just make it useless. That is why you should copy icons from knows icons. Only time you should create one is when there is none that can convey the concept.
Where do you see a problem with this?
Do you seriously not understand the difference between copying an icon from a (potential) competitor and adhering to accepted standards of appearance like for a save icon?
By the way you may have noticed they put the icon into a product mockup, they didn’t use it as an icon
But it looks like the image could have come from Shutterstock, a source used by many companies for legitimately purchasing the royalties to use images. I know the company I work for regularly uses Shutterstock images in its marketing literature. I could easily have used that lens image in documentation I’ve produced had I had the need to. And that would have involved my company paying royalties to use the image. Who’s to say that’s not where Apple also got their icon? And given that many people wouldn’t know what the Aperture icon even looks like, I think there’s every chance whoever made that mock-up simply had no idea he was “copying” an icon at all. Looks like Gruber just jumping to conclusions based on very little / no research.
1. Shutterstock is a reasonably decent source of cheap stock imagery. However, I certainly wouldn’t rate it highly. It’s certainly a completely flawed and baseless statement to think that IF it came from Shutterstock, it is therefore legitimate. Anyone using Shutterstock should know that it’s rife with stolen, copied, or modified imagery and needs to use it responsibly. Your assertion is equivalent to: “I saw it uploaded on YouTube; therefore, there can’t be any copyright or trademark issues.”
2. The suggestion that it’s reasonable to presume that Apple didn’t create the icon and that they too purchased it from Shutterstock, or that such a theory is at least just as likely, is completely and utterly laughable.
3. Even if we take your assertions and limited understanding of design for granted, at best, what you are asserting is that XiaoMi creates product marketing 3D renders of real-world products by cobbling some cheap clipart together from disparate sources. Consider that: they don’t fully assemble a product rendering from CAD drawings which are then beautified by skilled graphic designers… they literally cut and paste 2D elements (from an icon!) into a 3D render. This is damning with faint praise and certainly doesn’t suggest that XiaoMi is equally capable and doing their own design work.
Oh boy, this is just an icon! This is NOT inovation. If they put it in their presentation it’s so people know what they are talking about with something familiar to them. They did not steal some military secret. It’s not the plans of some revolutionary satelite launcher, it’s an icon depicting a lens! I don’t see what is wrong there. It’s not like Apple has invested a billion dollars creating that icon. I put floppy disk icons in my presentations too and they are directly taken from some Microsoft products. I doubt Microsoft will sue me, because they don’t fucking care that I used their floppy disk icons. It’s not a Van Gogh, it’s a picture of a lens.
I can only assume you didn’t bother reading any of the linked articles or even look at the images, because you keep blathering on about it just being an icon and just being in a presentation, when the image in question is a 3d product render used on their web site and likely in all of their product marketing.
If you are going to insist on trolling from a completely ignorant position, at least put 5 minutes into “some” reading to make it less transparent.
The thing is you think it’s important but it’s not.
There is a big irony you probably didn’t catch about the “One more thing” story. Look at the “One more thing” screen from Xiaomi and look at the one from Apple. The difference is the font they used. Apple’s font is thick and Xiaomi’s is thin. Why is that so? The answer to this is trend. Xiaomi’s font is thin because the trend has been set by Microsoft’s Metro design. Now look at the first iPhone and the latest one. In the first iPhone I see organic design all over the place and man it was cool back then. Everybody wanted their product to look like this. Fast forward to now. I look at the iPhone and all I see is flat design all over the place. Did Apple “invent” flat design? Hell f–king no! They copied the style directly from Microsoft. Because that’s the trend.
Apple is no longer the underground underdog in the industry and sometimes they set the trend but they happily follow the trend set by others when their home made trend is falling behind.
Xiaomi is no different. They surf the trend set by Apple and Microsoft and many others in their presentations and marketing. It’s perfectly normal and everybody does that, including Apple. Because design is all about trend. Design is not inovation, it’s only what conveys your inovations.
Xiaomi probably has dreams of setting new trends when they are bigger but for now they are too small for that. So they get trendy icons and put it in their marketing and they come from Apple. They probably didn’t think much about it but it was actually very good for them that someone called them on it because now they get a lot of free marketing. Never heard about Xiaomi before today.
Edited 2014-07-23 16:44 UTC
No I do not think it’s important. I think it is what I have stated it to be: XiaoMi, as a company is weak at design, and the vast majority of any perceived design strength comes from drafting off of Apple and others (but largely Apple) through cheap copying. That’s it.
The rest of your defense neither makes much sense or is that relevant (I’m not claiming Apple invented flat design; I’m claiming that XiaoMi is so weak at design they are incapable of even producing or paying for original product renders of their own products). Yes, I understand that Apple has had success and others are chasing after it. That’s part of the point, not a rebuttal. I couldn’t care less about the font; to me, the fact that they are using “One More Thing” (whether or not it was successful for Apple and thus may be something worth copying) to actually make the claim that they aren’t copying Apple and are following their own “innovative” path (while copying) is completely absurd, transparent, and is what it is: copying.
I’m not of the opinion that this is a major legal or financial infraction, nor that this is the end of civilization, nor that these two particular instances of copying have much benefit or harm for XiaoMi… merely, that it makes it apparent that they are weak on design and their own innovation (whether that be applied strictly to tech or any other category like graphic design or marketing or business strategy) is either completely lacking or cribbed from others.
Edited 2014-07-23 16:49 UTC
They clearly are thinking about it because they specifically ended their product launch presentation to state that they aren’t copying Apple (while copying Apple). I don’t understand what you are thinking of your “defenses” and “rationalizations” — all you are doing is restating what I’ve said: XiaoMi is weak and incapable at design and must copy from others. The part that is galling is that they are attempting to call themselves out as unique, innovative, non-copiers when it is apparent that they are none of those things.
Your ignorance is proof of nothing, except that you are arguing from an uninformed position.
Exactly, that’s why its crazy. Why bother rip off a lens? It shows the length they will go to to just rip stuff off instead of doing something themselves.
I should add, it sounds crazy to us in the West. But, in some areas it doesn’t sound crazy at all. I spent some time teaching computers in the third world. When coming up with business ideas, they came up with things like make “Nike shoes”. I they thought they could just design shoes and slap the “Nike” logo on them and sell them. Things like copyright don’t make sense at all they seem crazy to those that didn’t grow up with the concept.
So I don’t mean to say, that Chinese companies do things like this with mal intent. Rather, they do it because it makes sense to them, and not doing it would be crazy.
I’d say the problem is even more fundamental.
Again, what appears to have happened (based on some presumptions of course but much more reasonable ones than those being made in defense of it) is someone (internal or external) was preparing 3d product renders, got to the camera lens which caused them to hit the wall on their design skills and were unable to do it for themselves so, rather than hire or outsource to someone who was competent, they looked to the most obvious photorealistic 3d render of a camera lens they could think of (even though it is of an SLR, doesn’t look remotely like a smartphone camera lens, so it certainly doesn’t look like the Mi camera lens), pasted a mask over the identifiable text, and then (maybe worst of all) applied a much, much older iOS gloss/glass effect from (likely) a 5 year old online tutorial in producing iOS icons (this effect is not on the Aperture logo and definitely doesn’t match the other lighting effects), and then pasted that mangled, stolen 2d image over top the flaws in their 3d product render. (The only thing that I’ve come up with so far to mitigate or contradict this theory is maybe they didn’t have the design of the phone complete when they made the renders — but that doesn’t change the fact that preexisting Mi models, even completely other phones, or the possible camera components to be used certainly could have been available, would have been a far better match and that this hack is apparent, unskilled, and ugly, and would have avoided the whole silliness.)
In other words, they seem to mostly have been motivated by complete incompetence rather than the intentional mimicking of an Apple design choice (in this particular instance). There are plenty of other instances where they clearly are trying to draft off of Apple’s design successes and business decisions.
If you were to tell me that a company that was incapable of hiring or paying for a designer to make a competent 3d render of their very own product without cut-copying-pasting from the Internet (or a stock imagery agency or even directly and intentionally from Apple) and doing cheap 2d gloss effects that aren’t remotely photorealistic (and that they would do it twice but flip the image around in an unnecessary, sloppy manner), there is no way that I could ever believe that they are ever likely to have any design competency, never mind design excellence, of their own.
Edited 2014-07-23 19:20 UTC
Yeah, thats a good point.
I seriously doubt it was a top down decision from the ceo standing over the design team instructing them to rip off aperture’s icon.
Please.
“Professional” PR/marketing arms of corporations in the West often directly steal graphics etc from others to use all the time. Often from freelancers who can’t fight back.
Because here’s the thing:
The people working in those departments do not, as a matter of principle, work on the actual engineering of the actual product. The shoddiness of the marketing department, in the modern world, does not reflect competencies of the real engineers.
And unlike real engineers, it is really hard to actually vette the competencies of graphics designers. Only obsessed losers with nothing better to do can spot these kinds of things.
You do understand that XiaoMi claims otherwise and that they do have a quality design experience that is integrated into hardware engineering (like Apple)?
You do understand that Apple does have product marketing and graphic design working hand in hand with hardware and software engineering and that XiaoMi’s attempts to emulate that (but poor execution) is what is being talked about?
Claiming that XiaoMi isn’t the only company that is incompetent is not a very good defense of them.
Only the blind and people who want to look the other way can’t see it. Want to begin to test a graphic designer’s competence? A good place to start would be looking at their portfolio… Duh… (but if you are incapable of seeing this, maybe you should have someone else do the looking) …But certainly this would make a good mini-test: just show them the Mi web site and see how many Apple icons they can find.
Edited 2014-07-24 13:45 UTC
So the people who do their promotional graphics also do their electronics design etc? They all have double PhDs in electronics and graphic design? Okay.
No, what is being talked about is your rather idiotic claim that you can judge a company’s hardware design team based on the shoddy work of their marketing team.
I don’t defend them because there’s nothing to defend. The copied a JPEG. So fucking what? If I was a penny pinching businessman, I wouldn’t want to pay graphics designers any more than necessary for a stupid picture of bloody lens or a rounded rectangle.
And how would you tell, looking at their portfolio, that certain parts were not just copy and pasted from somewhere, genius?
If it was that easy, then why do big companies get caught out time and time again stealing stuff from freelancers?
You must be the best graphic designer judge in existence. Why aren’t they knocking at your door in droves?
Do you know what also would be a good test? Actually go through Apple’s marketing graphics and find which ones are actually legitimately theirs. No one has done that, because as we all know, religious people criticize every religion but their own, and make fallacious arguments along the lines of “because they have done something wrong, it means WE’RE right”.
When did I say this? It appears you may be blind, but I assumed you must be using a screen reader. When did I remotely say this idiocy?
Who made this claim? Again, not I. Where did I say this?
You aren’t defending them? You are doing an awful lot of not-defending them.
They’re called eyes.
Examples?
I make a decent living…
Feel free to do so. I have real evidence of the point I am expressing. You are pretending that there may be evidence of something that isn’t likely to exist. But show me proof that Apple is also being incompetent and I will criticize them for it too. But since you don’t care to actually look at the existing evidence, don’t care to defend XiaoMi, and seemingly wouldn’t care if Apple did something similar, I assume we’ll continue to get empty nonsense from you. Thanks.
I stand corrected. When I read this:
“If you were to tell me that a company that was incapable of hiring or paying for a designer to make a competent 3d render…there is no way that I could ever believe that they are ever likely to have any design competency, never mind design excellence, of their own.?”
I assumed you were talking about all aspects of design, including the form factor. As I understand of smartphone design, making things fit into a tight space requires creative electronics design.
But now I see I was reading more sense and proportion into your blather than was attempted by you, so my mistake.
I’m defending logic and reason.
I don’t care about Apple or Android. I don’t have a smartphone. I just love when tech people keep making stupid logically fallacious arguments, unbecoming of people in tech.
And you’ve seen EVERY SINGLE GRAPHIC in existence and REMEMBER THEM ALL before you’ve seen that designer’s portfolio that you’ll be able to figure out right away that it’s a copy? You do know what a copy is, right? Something must have already been in existence. If you see something for the first time, you can’t know if it’s a copy until you see it somewhere else a second time.
But then again you may actually have that ability. If you’ve got nothing better to do than to look at every Aperture pic on Xiaomi’s website, then you’ve probably got enough of a no-life to do the same with every single graphic design.
Not off the top of my head. But they have made the news on Slashdot a few times, and then in the comments some freelancers share their experiences of having their stuff stolen. And other bits of news I pick up here and there.
And come on, they even steal songs, and THEY do make the non-tech news. Surely you can’t be that ignorant and naive about corporate bullying?
A company who copied right from the beginning (and the reputation of doing so) with regards to software and hardware and design magically would not have copied graphics. Yeah, right.
I’m not saying the evidence exists. I’m saying no one has looked because they assume Apple is always the good guy. When losers spend all their time looking at Android makers and never at Apple, of course they’ll find a lot shoddy copies. But just because you don’t look for them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Hahahaha! In every way, every word of this post is hilarious! Thanks for the laugh.
I’ve seen this tactic before. A shameless copy.
You’re not laughing. You want to portray yourself as laughing to hide the fact that you’re wrong and petty over copying of stupid images.
Your question is easily answered. They didn’t put effort to copy that icon. The real question you should ask is why bother NOT copying it?
Your rant about chinese companies do not make sense to me. I’m in Europe and I copy stuff from the Internet on a daily basis to make presentations. It’s probably illegal but did you know betting with friends was illegal too? Nobody is harmed, nobody cares and nothing happens. Yep, in Europe.
Edited 2014-07-24 06:08 UTC
You are still confused. It is NOT being used as an ICON! It is on nearly every product marketing picture of every one of the phones throughout their web site! That’s right: just about every picture of a Mi phone on their own website contains a little image of Apple’s Aperture icon. Defending that in anyway is ridiculous.
Also, I don’t care about legality or harm… I care about complete and utter incompetence and this is certainly that.
Edited 2014-07-24 13:20 UTC
I understand what you are saying. I understand what they did and I perfectly agree they copied this icon (to put it in product mockups on their web sites)
There we have a common ground.
What I don’t agree with is that it shows incompetence.
I do that all the time and I consider myself competent. I think the result looks good and it seems to work well for Xiaomi. I don’t understand why you see a problem. Hiring a “competent” designer, as you call it, to draw a lens from scratch, is reinventing the wheel, in my opinion. Why draw it from scratch when you can get it from the Internet? With the time you saved not doing it from scratch you can polish another web page to have an even better looking web site. In my opinion it’s what a competent designer would do and the result looks good. I judge competency on the result so I don’t understand where you see incompetence.
Edited 2014-07-24 22:29 UTC
Some people really do think reinventing the wheel from scratch is a signpost of competence. One wonders what they think of open source.
Come on its a reflective lens – meant to look like a lens man this is such a small thing to bring up and its not even in context – the lens is a representation of the lens on the phone:
http://www.mi.com/en/mi3#design
that’s the same image showing the back of the phone which he is comparing to an application icon, this is just terrible Gruber is an ass, with too much time on his hands. All I can do is groan at bollocks like this.
Did you even read the verge article? Clearly they have copied many parts of Apple style in many areas. Not that trees anything wrong with that, it just shows a lack of creativity
Nah I didn’t bother I just looked at the nit picking Gruber is doing which just seems pointless. I haven’t checked the phone interface out, to be honest stuff like this really bores me.
So boring you’re spending time commenting on it.
😀
http://thumb7.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/437/99615185/s…
Edited 2014-07-24 08:13 UTC
If you want copycat, check out the QQ app (most popular IM platform in China) on Android.
http://i.imgur.com/wQHn5wP.png
All you’ve done is restate what has been stated: XiaoMi used Apple’s icon as a part of its product rendering. So what about that is bullocks?
No one (beyond people suggesting so that support you in this thread) that this is technological innovation or a million dollar theft.
What is being suggested is that XiaoMi does not have the design expertise of Apple and is clearly drafting behind Apple’s success to make up for that lack while they claim that they aren’t doing so and have equal, or at least up-and-coming, design skills.
Does the phone itself look like an iphone clone ?
Out of the complete phone design picking up on the lense on the back of the phone in a render and comparing to an icon for a program – you don’t see the issue with this ?
Just to make my point:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9NHdozGjubk/Ul-vqIUwYHI/AAAAAAAAYE8/1dcCk…
Panasonic must have copied Apple – The lense looks like the aperture icon but they cropped the text (looks pretty similar)
or this:
http://i1183.photobucket.com/albums/x462/smbz9/Tut%202/T2pic1.p…
again same colours very similar. Are people really this stupid ?
No, they aren’t similar at all. Those are their own clearly distinct renders. Most Mi phone product renders have an Apple Aperture icon pasted on top of them. That’s ridiculous.
(I’m not addressing the issue of whether or not XiaoMi’s entire business attempts to ape Apple — it certainly does. I view this as a separate issue: displaying their complete and utter design incompetence.)
Even on the off chance they didn’t just copy it (which frankly I think they clearly did), you’d think they’d go for something a bit different.
You can’t claim to be innovative and then use something that looks so much like a competitor, that is quite clearly the opposite of innovation. “One more thing…”? seriously? That’s not just laziness anymore.
You genuinely don’t think it’s more likely he put “lens” into Shutterstock or similar on his company’s account? Because that’s what most people in most companies do. Everyone I know in and sort of development or design role does things that way, and every company they work for has an account with some stock image provider or other. Need a picture of a steering wheel? A TV? A girl playing on a swing? Just get it from the same place and you know that royalties are taken care of automatically. No messing about.
For me grabbing it from Shutterstock is an even lazier approach than searching for an icon to plagiarise, which makes it seem far more likely to me. I’m not disputing that it’s a lazy design, I just think you’re giving some bored designer more credit than is due.
You clearly don’t have much understanding of graphic design or product marketing. Because you lack expertise, funds, and skills, and thus do something, does not legitimize lazy behavior for a multi-billion dollar company claiming that it can take on Apple and that it doesn’t copy Apple.
This is a 3d product render. I can’t imagine any in-house or 3rd party product marketer or graphic designer assembling a 3D product render for major advertising by buying cheap 2D stock imagery. (Imagine: “Gah… I’m not good with this CAD stuff nor advanced texture and lighting effects… I will render the camera instead by looking for some cheap stock art… I found something in 6 seconds, let’s just cut and paste that in without any consideration beyond — I got it on ShutterStock thus it must be legit! — even if it does happen to remind me of a very distinctive design that I should be aware of as a designer for XiaoMi (even though I can’t actually build a 3d render from scratch myself, so obviously I’m not a very good designer, no surprise I don’t know my shit)” Anyone working like this is not a capable designer. They are running a mill drafting on the expertise of others. I’d rather hire a self-taught kid off the street, never mind a recent graphic design grad with a degree, or someone with years of experience.)
Your defense, though spirited, is damning.
Edited 2014-07-23 16:24 UTC
The flaring, the colour range, the reflected image. That’s one hell of a coincidence if it’s a generic shutter box image. I work extensively with graphics and images and if I was using an image that similar to a direct competitor I would go out of my way to change it.
That’s just me though.
Edited 2014-07-25 20:30 UTC
Copycat or not, Xiaomi phones are amazing and IMHO the only ones that can compete with the iPhones in terms of design and usability.
Xiaomi go go!!!
Why is it whenever Apple rips something off, like gestures which is stole from Blackberry 10 or the settings panel which it totally ripped off from Android the fanbois ooh and ahh and say stupid things like “that’s so innovative” or “wow, how unique and amazing”? When someone dares to borrow something from Apple, like a stinky little ol’ icon for the love of Pete then all of a sudden it’s a Capital offense and Apple should totally sue!
I am dumbfounded by the fact that this is even a concern of anyone other than a graphic artist at Apple and some IP lawyers. Do people really have nothing better to do than look for companies they perceive are imitating Apple? And out of all of the “imitations”, this has to be one of the most subtle forms I have ever heard someone get upset about. Think about it, people are upset because a company used an image similar (perhaps identical) to an Apple icon as a placeholder for a single component in a rendered model of a phone that, overall, looks nothing like any generation of iPhone. If anything, the overall design of this phone looks much more like a Nokia device, but Apple fans are up in arms that the camera lens, a single, relatively unimportant visual component of the design, looks like Apple’s icon of a camera lens. Don’t get me wrong – if Xiaomi did copy the image, then that is copyright infringement and I’m sure Apple will pursue them for it. I’m also aware of the fact that this doesn’t reflect well on Xiaomi when they’re claiming they don’t copy Apple. However, I can not think of a single thing less remarkable for Apple fans to be up in arms about when it comes to their favorite company being “copied”. This is a new low for fanboyism.
Actually you are a new low for fanboyism. This is an article pointing out an amusing company which not only is heavily “inspired” by apple in their product design, they even go so far as to match their presentation style and mannerisms of the past CEO.
No one ever claimed it was a terrible offence, it is just an amusing thing to note. The fact that you need to turn it into a war of apple vs whomever speaks volumes about how single track your thinking is. Relax, most of the fanboys you rail against exist only in your imagination.
It most definitely is Apple’s Aperture icon. I don’t consider it a major offense and don’t care in any legal sense. I do think it’s relevant in showing that they are incompetent hacks at XiaoMi, and I find that hilarious.
Also, this is not on a single render… Check out the Mi site… The Apple Aperture icon is on almost every image of a phone. It is shameless, incompetent, and hilarious!
Why would we check? We’re not losers with nothing better to do.
Yes, why be informed, much better to be ignorant.
Oh yeah. Certainly. I consider proper engineering and useful design and science to be more important. I’d gladly be ignorant of a stupid Aperture image.
I’m talking about merely being informed about what you are talking about… which happens to be the fact that XiaoMi not only copies Apple’s designs, they’re also so incompetent at design that nearly 80% of their product photos include Apple logos in them.
Still not making your case.
Under no circumstances should anyone care at all about stupid images. There is absolutely nothing worth knowing about it. They copied the image? Okay. END OF STORY.
Thom, why did you even post this???
Seriously, Gruber is a f*cking imbecile. The usual flock of idiots here are of course trying to (somehow) pile on and make a “controversy” out of this…
All you accomplished by posting this is help spread some of Gruber’s usual clickbait.
One of the most effective ways to deal with a child that is “acting out” is to ignore them when they do it. Can we please just ignore Gruber?
Just saying, I really think most of the crowd here is above this kind of manufactured sensationalism. Yes, some artist at Xiaomi probably copied this. Apple has been caught numerous times in the past doing the same thing. Same can be said for practically any company.
Everyone copies shit. All the grown ups already know this. Who cares?
Edited 2014-07-24 03:49 UTC
It’s always good to reveal some marketing nonsense, not leave people with the idea that Apple was the inventor of everything and they copy as well some lens pictures.
It’s not just by putting “Copyright 2014” that grants you the property of things.
Not even on rounded corner things : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Libby_McNeill_~*…
Kochise
exactly this, well said.. Sorry I cant vote you up I commented first, but really well put.
Hahaha,
I work in China, so I do know the history, it was designed specifically to give an Apple experience in all aspects. There is even one that looks amazingly like a Samsung
…If you have to explicitly state you’re not ripping someone/something off, …….
But then, do I actually care either way? No. I don’t care who came up with a camera lens icon first any more than I care who decided to put round corners on a rectangle first.