“Surprise, surprise, a certain Korean company copies more of Apple’s product design. When Apple launched the iPad mini in October 2012, Apple explained the design: the almost 8″ screen size and thin border allow one-handed use. Now, the new 8″ Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 has the same border design as the iPad mini.” From what I can only assume is the The Onion of technology reporting. I love humour like this on a lazy Friday afternoon.
You don’t see such craziness in any other industry. When all of the Soda manufacturers changed their 2 liter bottle design, no one really cared if one ripped off the other’s design. Or when they introduced 20 oz bottles, or 24 oz. or the really tiny 8 oz cans.
the same with the doors, windows and 4 wheels on a car
Don’t forget about 6-way electric seats!
Edited 2013-07-19 15:49 UTC
Really? You should try this experiment; go and open your own soda/sugar water bottling company, market your drinks in a container with the exact shape as the traditional Coca Cola glass bottle. Measure the actual seconds that will take between your product hitting the market and the hordes of lawyers bearing lawsuits knocking at your door.
Edited 2013-07-19 17:22 UTC
Last time I checked every single soda can at the store was the exact same size and shape.
Let’s hope your optometrist checks your eyes better than you check soda bottle design.
Ditto, he said *can* not bottle.
And your parent comment said bottle. So… I also hope you have a good eye doctor.
Generic aluminum cans are not trademarked, primarily because they are all basically the same – there is no unique design element to trademark, its just a cylinder. Coca Cola bottles on the other hand are trademarked.
That is why you see hundreds of soda products using identically shaped cans, but you only see one bottled soda with the shape/contours of a Coca Cola bottle.
So I think the OPs point is valid – if you make a soda and put it in a bottle shaped like Coca Cola’s they will sue the sh*t out of you…
On another note:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/39619/budweiser-bow-tie-can-11-3-…
This can is almost certainly trademarked, so if you want to get creative with cans it is possible.
Well, change the bottle shape a bit and add a twist and Coke wont sue…
http://i280.photobucket.com/albums/kk164/brokken-paul/Glass%20C…
Still holds Brown yummy fluid inside and is the same size.
However, Make it exactly the same shape and size and add some squiggly lines and…
http://au.tv.yahoo.com/sunrise/video/watch/10338697/coke-sues-pepsi…
The Galaxy Tabs are a different size than the iPad, have a different shape (wide-screen) and browse the internet almost the same way. When Sammy puts out some 4:3 ratio 10″ or 8″ tablets then we probably have an issue.
Really. No one has bothered about the small details of beverage bottles, with the one obvious exception of Coca-cola’s famous bottle.
If coke designs a new 13.278 ounce bottle, Pepsi will do the same and no one else will really care.
Old School: Yoohoo, Orangina, Gatorade… The last 20-15 years: Nantucket Nectar, Gatorade (again and about 6 times over), IBC Root Beer, Naked, Vitamen Water, Red Bull, RockStar… I can look at a cooler of 6 different orange juices or 6 different waters or walk down a drink aisle, and I could tell you the brand of 4 out of 5 bottles if they didn’t have labels. The number of newly introduced beverages that are concerned specifically with the uniqueness of their bottle… and protecting that unique identity outnumbers those who disregard it.
At least in my world. In your world, beverage bottling is an example of little regard for unique design and brand ownership… Oh well.
We live in very different world’s then.
Yes, we do. And in my world, the inability to distinguish a Gatorade bottle from a Powerade bottle, or a Vitamen Water and an Activate Water bottle, or a Red Bull can from a RockStar can, or a Fiji water bottle from a Dasani water bottle, or a Simply Orange or Minute Maid or Tropicana orange juice bottle is called “blindness” — certainly not “qualified to discuss product design and branding” as it seemingly is in yours.
Edited 2013-07-20 12:57 UTC
Seriously? “qualified to discuss product design and branding”?
Just wow. Uhm… This is the internet, welcome. Enjoy your stay, be careful of what links you click on. There be dragons.
If you hold up drink bottles as a market where there is no desire to create a unique identity and to protect it, yes, that will disqualify you from the conversation. You can talk all you want (as you say, it is the Internet), but I can also point out that you are clueless, blind, and not qualified.
“Not qualified on the internet” My new all time favorite saying. Thanks.
You’re welcome. But I didn’t say it. SO whatever.
I’ll say it again: anyone who thinks the beverage market is a good example of a market which chooses to ignore uniqueness of product, packaging, and brand design and which chooses to not try to create, defend, or protect unique designs has disqualified himself from the conversation of whether or not another product is unique, worthy of protection, copied or originated, etc… by sake of his extreme lack of awareness and perception of the fact that the beverage market is PREDICATED on unique, protectable designs.
You’ll notice I’ve abandoned arguing the actual original topic in this thread. This is because :
1) You didn’t understand ( Not 100% your fault, I could have been clearer as could you have)
2) You’re too upset to reason with. ( this thread is off the rails, no hope for it now. Even if I get you to understand what I was saying, you’re too emotionally involved to grant the point. ).
3) Your responses were too funny to ignore on a meta level, which may have upset you further instead of ending the discussion / lightening up the thread as I had hoped.
Sorry this didn’t go well, I apologize for getting you so upset.
Have a drink on me.
please don’t assume personal ignorance on a subject is somehow authoritative.
There are many types of packaging, and since your example is regarding the sugary drink bottling industry, let’s dwell there: The reason why most of the 2 liter bottles and cans look the same is mainly because they are a licensed designs developed by companies which develop bottling technologies (and the production lines that are bought/used by the bottling companies themselves). Also the purchasing patterns for a 2 litter bottle are different than for a single individual serving, there is enough surface area in a large bottle to let the labeling provide most of the differentiation. That is why even though you could probably license the 2 liter plastic bottle which looks similar to the coke one, you will have a very bad time if you go ahead and copy the coke label verbatim and try to sell it as your product.
However, in other sizes some companies decide that it’s the shape of the bottle that which provides the most differentiation/marketability. So those shapes tend to be more specific to the vendor, and are more “protected” so to speak.
And yes, in an ideal world all this silliness would be superfluous. But since we operate in under a socioeconomic system centered solely around the concept of profit, if you intend on copying something like a bottle shape which another company considers their intellectual “property.” You’re going to have a bad time with the legal proceedings.
http://www.patentadesign.com/gallery/coca-cola-bottle-design-patent…
To be fair, most of them are owned by only one or two companies.
Not a sole person on that site, even in the comments has ever heard of the Nexus 7? Not one? No one even bothered to look at other brands of tablets other than Samsung?
Wow
Completely agree. Added a comment there about that http://www.android.gs/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/iPad-Mini-vs-Nexus…
Yup. I find all this ridiculously funny given the fact that Apple’s very *branding* was subject to litigation for years, given the contention that they ‘stole’ it from The Beatles.
This is a market. The market decides. Apple still has seemingly the highest levels of customer satisfaction regarding the iPad in relation to OTO (other tablet offerings).
The only time Apple itself will get up and do something really new here is when Samsung’s market power emulates its own. It’s called competition.
There are two types of conformity. That due to function, optimal physical/haptic requirements, as UX design principles that allow the user to find his or her employment of any tool or device to be ‘intuitive’. A spade is a spade, after all.
The other would be due to diktat from on high, from states and totalitarian regimes.
Luckily we are discussing the niceties of the former situation here. As someone else has posted, others have less to be fortunate about, and are caught up in cases where they are struggling with dire political duress to fall in line, and I agree that’s the real world. For example, I would get really worried if news articles on a certain ex-intelligence operative of the USA were based on deciding his personality type or personal preferences in light of his tablet choice :-s.
At first I couldn’t believe the Apple teat-sucking going on in the comments, and then I read the site description, “Apple iPhone & iPad News, Celebrity Mac Users and More”. I should have known. I guess it’s hard to look at things objectively when your identity is tied up in which tech products you use.
yeah, true of many people regardless of the actual company they worship.
I just recently watched “Steve Jobs: The lost Interview”, he was interviewed a year before he came back to Apple. One of the best parts is where he blasts companies for doing things only because they’ve always done them. Once you indoctrinate yourself into a system where everything company X does is good, you lose that rational ability to discern what really is good and what is not in an objective sense.
Is that why Apple gets away with putting out the same old shit in every product?
The new Mac Pro is far from “the same old shit”, it’s the first truly new direction in consumer/prosumer PCs in many years. Sure, it’s horridly expensive and most of us will never need one, but it’s a great example of the company innovating.
Unfortunately it’s also the only really good example, because apart from it there hasn’t been a lot of innovation from them lately.
My point precisely!
Since the demise of Steve Jobs, Apple has pretty much recycled the same ideas into it products wit very few exceptions, the exceptions being either totally bizzare, stupidly expensive or both!
What new direction? They just crammed standard PC components into a trashcan with a retarded cooling solution.
Really? I’d love to see you manage to fit any of those components in a standard PC case and plug in to the stock power supply. Beyond the physical aspect, I don’t think they stock 12 core Xeon E5 motherboard/CPUs at Best Buy…you know, a store that sells standard PCs. And I doubt you’ll find a commercially available motherboard that will let you plug in that mini-PCI-E SSD, much less find it on a consumer shelf next to the other, normal boards.
As for the cooling solution, have you personally seen it in action? I haven’t, and I doubt many people have at this point, including you. So until it has been tested and compared to other machines, how can you claim to know how well it works? Or did I miss your PhD in thermal design?
But you’re definitely right about one thing: It certainly looks like a trash can!
My point is, you can put together a computer with all of those things, of course not at your local corner store but what’s wrong with ordering parts online? If you really want something similar to the mini-pcie ssd you can get one of those OCZ Revo Drives ( http://ocz.com/consumer/pci-express-ssd ). Sure, it will not be as compact as the new mac pro but what’s wrong with that? I really liked the old tower sized ones.
I haven’t seen the cooling in action, you got me there that’s just my guesswork but spreading heat from all your system components (that heat up to various degrees) is going to cause unnecessary rise in temperatures in all elements when for example only you graphics cards are doing heavy work. But again – that’s my guesswork. We’ll see.
Edited 2013-07-21 08:42 UTC
commercially available minipcie msata motherboard? http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GA-Z68XP-UD3-1155-Intel-Motherboard/…
Yeah, I got obsessed with the idea of my next motherboard having ALL the ports. It actually use to be a lot harder to find almost sure the only one I use to find was a Jetway(?). I seem to remember there are a handful of Mitx options but it’s been awhile since I checked.
Anyways, back to your previous scheduled argument.
Awesome find! Now, put two hexacore Xeon E5 CPUs on it…oh wait.
My point was that Apple put all that awesome, forward-thinking tech into one tiny, supposedly quiet, and arguably ugly case, for the cost of the car I drive to work. I won’t buy one as it would be way beyond my needs and budget, but to say it’s “a pile of crap” as the GP poster implied, is simply asinine.
Seriously though, that’s an interesting board!
Yep, the comments on that page really paints a pretty ugly picture of Apple-users.
Its like reading the comment-section on some racist hick blog.
And all there seems to fall under… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe‘s_law
Funny, the first time I saw the iPad Mini I thought it looked like an enlarged version of that Galaxy Note phablet phone. Who copied who now?
I’ve often wondered how Microsoft was able to patent ClearType. Apple was using exactly the same method to smooth the screen fonts on the Apple ][.
Dunno why you’re down-voted, but I think Clear Type actually used sub-pixel smoothing vs the Apple II’s method.
That said, I would never consider the patent office to give a crap about prior art or obviousness. They grant any old thing and let the courts slug it out.
While clearly posted to provoke the author, one comment on that site did raise an interesting philosophical point (and I apologize now for the extremeness of the language – you’re probably best to skip over this bit if you’re easily offended
)
The thing is, if you cut out the swearing and the obvious trolling, there is some sense there. These fanboys (and not just from Apple either) are wasting their lives complaining about stuff that is so trivial it makes you question the priorities of humanity. I mean, obviously you can’t expect people to be fighting against important topics all of the time – but sometimes it seems that some people care more about whether their preferred brand name came up with an obvious idea before the brand name the don’t like. And to them, those issues surpass anything else in their lives. As a platform agnostic, that whole behavior strikes me as completely bonkers.
Edited 2013-07-19 19:24 UTC
Thing is, I’m sure almost everyone here realizes that.
It’s just that we’ve all made/seen a post like that on some forum or comments section before, and got the usual “cool story bro” or “you must be a riot at parties” response.
Seems that people who are fond of arguing first world problems prefer their discussions be on-topic and limited to first world problems. Anyone who comes in tries to put things into perspective will automatically be labeled as condescending since he’s insulted their collective materialistic manhood.
The rabid fanboy-ism is totally tribalistic behavior. I really like how Mark Shuttleworth summed it up in his blog post ( http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/439 ). Tribalism is what drives so much human division, whether in politics, sports, or even technology. We become less interested in the truth, and more interested in the “other side” losing or being proven wrong. We become easily offended because we place our identity so strongly in these different groups.
From the linked blog post: “The very uncool thing about being a fanboy (or fangirl) of a project is that you’re openly declaring both a tribal affiliation and a willingness to reject the work of others just because they belong to a different tribe.”
Guess from whom Apple copied:
1994
http://winfuture.de/videos/Hardware/Tablet-Konzept-des-US-Verlages-…
1989
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/PADD
From the second link: “”PADD” is an acronym for Personal Access Display Device, a hand-held computer interface, used as early as the 22nd century”.
Clearly fails to mention the first prototypes by a fruit company in the 21st century.
Edited 2013-07-23 19:13 UTC
Fanboys sometimes get really silly
The Galaxy Tab 3 is almost identical (once resized) to an S4 which itself is a simple evolution form the S3.
http://www.gizmodo.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/galaxy-S4-1.jpg
The release date for the S3 was May 2012.
This article (the one we were linked to) is just a way, for some “sad” fans to keep faith in the “Apple is the leader; everybody copies” myth
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2013/07/google-caught-r…
Not exactly earth shattering but someone at Google is probably feeling a bit embarrassed
Probably not.
Only Apple fan boys and others who are extremely naive on design and the patent process are impressed by this comparison. The similarity of the drawings has absolutely nothing to do with one party lifting innovation from another party.
Anyone savy to design and engineering can see that the Google drawing was merely used to illustrate a physical configuration relating to a process (for user presence detection?) while the Apple drawing is for something more specific and technical (probably relating to the elongated trackpad). I didn’t even look at the two patents in question, but I am 99% positive that the claims in each patent are different.
What probably happened was that someone at Google showed the Apple drawing to the patent attorney or to the patent draftsman, and the Google person said to make a drawing of a laptop that looks like that with view lines coming out of the camera. The patent draftsman took it too literally and pressed the “easy button” by tracing/copying the Apple drawing. Nobody bothered to change anything after the fact, because redoing it would cost money, and because the similarity between the Apple and Google drawings are actually immaterial to the patent claims.
At any rate, it is amazing that anybody would consider an elongated trackpad to be patentable, and, likewise, it is amazing that someone would consider patentable such an obvious process as that in the Google application.
What would be more damning is if someone claimed that a company invented something when prior art actually exists. Such is the case with Apple fanboys claiming that Apple invented “thin” bezels.
Here is a photo of the original LG Prada: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/extra/MOBILE/large/LG_KE…
Note the thinner bezels on the side compared to the bezels on the top and bottom. Does the Prada’s bezel configuration remind you of anything?
“Thin” side bezels were not invented by Apple with the Ipad Mini — such a “design” existed years before the Ipad Mini. The “design” even existed before the Iphone and the Ipod Touch, as the Prada was winning design awards a year before those Apple products were released.
There is probably other prior art from years before, but the notion that anybody “invented” thin bezels is so ridiculous that it is not worth finding and linking such examples.
Edited 2013-07-20 21:35 UTC
Calm down. Nobody is saying that anybody copied anything other than a drawing. Probably someone wanted to save some time and thought no one would notice if they copied the drawing. It’s just amusing, hence my reference to laughing.
What is it about IP legal actions that brings out the pompous and apocalyptic in people. The whole issue, IP law, patents, legal actions, is just so utterly trivial, and tedious, with almost no real world implications or repercussions for anyone.
It’s obvious that they paid homage to Apple’s design and improved on it.
Oh, please, neither Apple nor Samsung are responsible for thin bezels!
It is obvious that dead space is undesirable in your handheld device – the most compact your device is, with the same size screen, the better.
Now, ultra thin bezel, ultra high resolution, ultra low consumption or ultra highbrightness LCD SCREENS are bound to be more expensive than, say, cheaper screens. Apple selling at sky high prices can afford to BUY those screens earlier than no name chinese tablet makers. But they buy them from a manufacturer who sells them in the open market, be it Toshiba, LG, or maybe even Samsung.
Like Mercedes comes up with cars with Bosch ABS and airbags, and Hyundai follows suite later. It is Bosch who innovated! Only, Mercedes could afford it earlier.
Using expensive components that are commercially available might make you a luxury brand, not an innovation powerhouse. Apple is only a luxury brand. They did innovation (mixed with healthy copying) in the past, but now they do polishing and branding (and a healthy dose of copying, too). Like Mercedes. That’s fine, if you want it and can afford it, but let’s not be carried away with admiration.
Maybe dead space is undesirable.
At the same time, there must be some place on “handheld” devices where you could put your fingers to _hold_ the thingy in your _hand_.
I’d assume the development illustrated in the following article would be interesting to be judged regarding “handheld device = a device you hold (and use) in your hand”…
http://www.behance.net/gallery/iPhone-6-An-edgy-concept/7617209
I’ve seen “unintended behaviour” of smartphones and other handheld devices, with loud complaining of the owners and users, when “improperly” holding the device or handing it over to someone else, like “Look, this is the photo I took!” or “Here, you can write that message yourself.” If you use 100 % of any surface of a device for interaction (means: touch-based input, not just visible output), problems can appear.
Mercedes is genuine innovator – they introduced crumple zones, inertia reel seatbelts, anti-burst door locks and hundreds of other safety innovations. In the vast majority of cases these innovations were developed in conjunction with partner companies using Mercedes funding. MB has always allowed competitors to access their safety patents at no cost after a short delay.
Mercedes is first and foremost an engineering company. MB requires senior managers to be PhD qualified mechanical engineers. A marketing or finance executive would never become CEO of MB. MB has never been a “luxury” car company (MB Cars are are well engineered – not luxurious. Even the most expensive S-Class models are quite spartan). Their main business is making trucks, buses and commercial vehicles.