"I have always regarded Apple products – and the kind words Jony Ive has said about me and my work – as a compliment. Without doubt there are few companies in the world that genuinely understand and practise the power of good design in their products and their businesses. [...] I am always fascinated when I see the latest Apple products. Apple has managed to achieve what I never achieved: using the power of their products to persuade people to queue to buy them."[1] --Dieter Rams (Braun designer from 1961 to 1995)
Dieter Rams made toasters and radios, and Apple extrapolated his design cues to things he never made, like laptops and trackpads.
That's a far cry from HP taking someone's design decisions for a all-in-one computer, doing no extrapolation, and using them to make a competing all-in-one computer.
I think Apple's clear use of Dieter Rams' design language is more of an "homage" than a "ripoff". The fact that the Apple products and Braun products are separated by decades and in different product categories makes a difference.
Disagree, in at least terms of the Calculator - that's not homage, that's blatant copying. Colors, identical, button shape and layout, identical, ratios, identical. The thing looks like someone traced it in Photoshop. That's not "homage".
Comparing the design of a toaster with the Mac Pro design is not the same thing as comparing the design of a standalone PC with a standalone Mac. Especially if the company who copies had much different design before "everyone started copying Apple".
Inspiration is one thing but copying even the keyboard, mouse and the trackpad is a bit too much, don't you think? PC makers seem so desperate at the moment...
Apple took a design that was made 40 years ago and used it in their products. Ofcourse, Apple is not in radio or toaster business. It may be correct from the eye of a lawyer. But, if you show both these designs to someone who is neither affiliated apple or technology what would they think? It looks like a blatant copy to me. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would agree. We should not confuse good marketing with innovation.
I think this is hard for engineers, software engineers probably particularly, to get, but there's a thing called a design language.
No question Apple has used Rahm's design language, they're unapologetic about it. In the past, Apple used Frog design to make a design language for Apple (you see this most notably on the Apple //c and products of that era.)
If Apple were mindlessly copying Braun products and selling turntables and radios that looked just like the Braun versions then we'd be saying that's very stupid and unoriginal.
But understanding the reason Rahms made certain choices and then applying that set of perspectives and perception of the utility of objects to another context, namely computers and accessories, is a very different thing.
Sure the calculator app on the iPhone is a clear homage to Rahms, but this is very different from the iPod which uses the same design language for a completely different product with different needs.
I think there might be a level of observation that engineers sometimes don't have, such that they think that "this just looks good" and "You're paying a lot for it being pretty" (which is funny about products that are actually cheaper, and have been for 1.5 decades.) This leads to being unable to tell the difference between samsung slavishly copying Apple's look, or HP drawing very heavily from Apple's look to an assumption that its the "only way this can be engineered."
The reason you think that it is inevitable that products would end up looking like the iPhone is because Apple makes them look inevitable-- eg: they are very well designed.
A very well designed item is perfect-- it is the perfect form for its functions.
But Apple's competitors are making different products, and if they were competent at design, they would end up looking very different-- are these not differentiated products in terms of function? Features? Obviously they are. But the reason they fail is they then try to slavishly make it look like the Apple product, which undermines the whole point of differentiation in the first place... and also forces the product into a design that was created for a different product.
Nothing is inevitable. Think of the history of mouses and how clunky they were in the 1980s-- and Apple's mice in the 1980s and 1990s had a great deal of human factors engineering and design in them-- they have always been well designed-- were each one of them the "ultimate" inevitable design? Obviously not.
I'd just like to add something: there are some of us that love nice (alternatively read: Apple) hardware but do not want to run OSX. Sure I could buy a MBP and install linux or Windows on it; but that is absurd. Mac hardware is designed to work with Mac software and it does a great job at that.
I really was hoping someone would do a nice job of making a macbook-like product without having to rip Apple off wholesale; I'm still waiting for this. No other laptop in the world feels as good to use as an Apple notebook.
Do you know how horrible every other trackpad in the world is?
The could use the same language, but they aren't. Even in this device which is copying the iMac, they copied the look of it, and failed to use the same design language!
