On Tuesday, HP unveiled its Envy Spectre XT Ultrabook, but it was met with comments about its MacBook Air similarities. Yesterday, HP fought back.
Engadget reports that, at a conference in Shanghai, vice president of design at HP, Stacy Wolff said: “I think if you look at the new Spectre XT, 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.”
“I see a lot of differences as much as the similarities,” Wolff told Engadget after the conference. “Ours is rubber-coated at the bottom. We use magnesium; they didn’t do that – they use CNC aluminium. We did a brush pattern on our product; they didn’t.”
“We did a different kind of keyboard execution,” Wolff continued. “We did audio as a component; they didn’t.”
Wolff claims that they didn’t choose similar features to the MacBook air for the Envy Spectre because Apple did it first. “It’s just where the form factor is leading it,” he said.
Wolff said that recent lawsuits between Samsung and Apple over design similarities between their smartphones and tablets could scare some companies. “I think that the struggle as we, again, drive to that simplicity, the shape just becomes one. I don’t think a lot of other companies are purposely designing to be copycats. I think a few might be,” said Wolff.
Many of the comments about the similarities between HP’s new notebook and Apple’s MacBook Air refer to the black keyboard against the silver body of the laptop. “You know, the funny thing is that we did that before they didn’t, but no one gave us credit,” Wolff argued.
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Comments received
kai65 said on Thu, 10 May 2012
Pretty poor excuse for a lack of imagination and innovation...
Dragonfly said on Fri, 11 May 2012
"there are similarities in a way, not due to Apple but due to the way technologies developed."
...but mostly we wanted to copy the MacBook Air. :-)
It's like a Chinese imitation of a MacBook Air. It looks the same at a quick glance, but it doesn't take too many seconds to realise that it's not.
Ultimately I don't think HP will sell more of these because it looks a little like a much better computer. In some ways 2nd rate imitations remind us even more that we actually wanted the real deal.
theanimaster said on Fri, 11 May 2012
"We put in a backlit keyboard, they didn't... oh wait..."
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