HP expands Mac-cloning design approach across all of its latest notebooks

HP expands Mac-cloning design approach across all of its latest notebooks:

Photo: The Verge

HP appears to be taking its If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em design philosophy to something of an extreme with the new HP Envy notebook. A gallery posted by The Verge shows just how closely HP has copied Apple’s MacBook Air designs in almost every respect, from the wedge profile through the chicklet keyboard, trackpad and colors …

Take away the logo, and at first glance, you could easily mistake the HP clone for the original.

The heading used here by HP even appears to be a shameless admission of the approach:



The irony of HP CEO Meg Whitman’s commentary on this made me laugh aloud:

Last year, Hewlett-Packard decided to unify the design of every thin and light laptop it sold, applying the same basic curves across every keyboard, touchpad, hinge, lid, and frame. This year, it’s not just thin-and-light laptops getting the treatment: according to company representatives, CEO Meg Whitman has now mandated a unified design language across HP’s entire portfolio of consumer machines. “She took a look at our portfolio and said, ”I don’t know what’s HP.’”

She does now know what’s HP, apparently. When she said last year that “Apple taught us that design really matters,” she seemingly meant this rather literally …
HP does have form for this. The company last year released the Spectre One desktop. Remind you of anything?

Photo: Engadget

Even the trackpad and mouse were cloned.
HP is not alone in this, of course, as our own Jordan Kahn saw at the IFA in Berlin last year, but it does seem rather more blatant than most. HP’s approach may even go back further, to the HP Touchsmart back in 2011:

Which we felt looked kinda familiar …

Perhaps HP thought it was just the next logical step after simply stamping its own logo on the back of an iPod:

Photo: Wikipedia

(That one was legitimate: a deal with Apple dating back to 2004 to sell HP-labelled iPods through its distribution networks.)