LG chisels wedge-shaped Ultrabook LG has revealed its first Ultrabook offering: the Xnote Z330, a 13.3in, 1366 × 768 machine with a MacBook Air-esque wedge design. LG Xnote Z330 Ultrabook There's a 1.6GHz Core i5-2467M processor on board the 1.2kg laptop - you can pick one with a 1.7GHz Core i7-2637M instead - and 120GB or 256GB of 6Gb/s Sata solid-state …
What a complete rip-off from the Macbook Air - I actually had to double-take as it's so similar.
What next they just happen to have an illuminated Apple symbol on the back.
Can you imagine the fuss if someone ripped off (almost perfectly) the design of a BMW or Porsche - but they think it's ok for a laptop / phone.
there are many ways to design a car. a laptop is basically a screen, keyboard and trackpad. do you expect them to have to make triangular laptops made out of cheese? :)
how many ways are there to design a laptop?
did apple really invent aluminium laptops?
were apple the first to use that type of keyboard?
did they patent silver now?
did apple really invent multitouch (i thought they bought it)
A lot of notebook manufacturers rightfully loose trust in their own ability to design something decent, cause what you see on the shelves is mostly crap from an industrial design standpoint.
The funny thing is, while Apple's interpretation of the old Braun design philosophy mainly lives off getting rid of the unnecessary, which is a very very good trait, it doesn't mean in any way that their designs are so good that they couldn't be improved upon.
I really hope laptop manufacturers will start hiring better designers, cause there's no need to be so pathetic to copy Apple.
Samsung did hire Georgio Armani to come up with a great phone design, but then they used his design for the original Galaxy S, which was about to expire, rather than the new model.
This whole deal looks like what Hollywood does: someone's sword and sandal movie does well in the cinema, suddenly everybody wants to make sword and sandal movies.
Why the fuck don't they just go the whole way and call it the LGBook Air? This things' a damn carbon copy. - did all innovation in design suddenly stop when Apple came out with the MBA?
Aluminium unibody, check.
Gloss edge-to-edge screen with black bezel and silvered logo text below center? check.
Black chicklet embedded keyboard? check.
Unipanel touchpad? check.
Wedge-shaped profile? check.
Heck, even Marketing's got in on the act - that first photo with it open and hanging? Sure I've seen that in an Apple Store window somewhere.
FFS people - come up with something original or be prepared to be sued out of existence by Apple's hair-trigger lawyers. And quite rightly too, in this case.
It always looks wrong, 16:9, on a laptop - fat bezels top and bottom; often they "make up for this" by putting a webcam up top, and a company logo at the bottom. We all know the logo at the bottom of the screen often used to be there to create a thick bezel where the inverter could sit, but now laptops are using LED backlights, it just looks stupid.
Somehow I doubt Apple will be pooing themselves. £960 + VAT is £1150, so even assuming that there isn't any extra markup for getting a £ symbol on the keyboard, it's £100 more than the MacBook Air. Knock-offs ought to be cheaper than the real thing or there's no point.
Even if you think Mac OS is the spawn of a bald satan, it'll probably work out cheaper to buy the MacBook and then slam Windows onto the thing with Boot Camp.
well, putting windoze on mac books would theoretically be a nice idea, but Apple's hardware support for WIndoze is the pits. Their laptops run louder, hotter and slower under windows than under OSX, and they run slower than anything with the same specs from the Windows competition.
Among other things, connect an external hard drive under windows and the whole thing crashes.
So its not really an option. At least Sony still makes their own design, and they have a notebook that weighs the same as the MacBook air, but has a real GPU 1600x900 resolution and even an optical drive. Of course its not as thin, but I couldn't care less about thin, I want functionality at low weight, and Sony packs that in a nice casing made from magnesium alloy and aluminum.
"...Apple's hardware support for Windoze is the pits. Their laptops run louder, hotter and slower under Windows than OSX, and they run slower than anything with the same specs from the Windows competition"
Bollocks.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/210840/macbook_air_outperforms_most_windows_netbooks_and_ultraportables.html
And that's the older, lower-spec 2010 MBA.
The Air is recognised as a pretty thing, even though it doesn't relate to the way it functions. Unlike a car, where airflow plays a large part in the function. Yes, its going to be aluminium unibody - at these thicknesses its pretty much an engineering requisite for cooling and strength.
If you are going for something very thin you will pretty much need the wedge shape - that is the shape of a keyboard device all the way back to manual typewriters. Its called a tilting keyboard.
So it copies the look of the mba. Big deal. How many black boxes around 1.5 inches thick have we seen with rounded corners. That is the form which follows the function for that class of device. I'm not sure we can grant apple a patent on thin wedge shaped computers. MBP's aren't wedgy - do they get a patent on non-wedgy computers too?
Lots of ports on the edge, no discernible trackpad. Different keyboard layout and logo inside. Clearly not a mac, even if the marketing is cheeky.
Still a bit of Meh! too. So it has extra ports over the mba. That isn't enough to buy an LG device over a mac at those prices and with that screen. I wouldn't want to try to drive a 27" screen from it either...
but it's not just the wedge. It's ... well, it's everything really. They've copied pretty much every aspect of the design even down to the marketing. It's not really hate, as competition is ultimately good for the consumer, but it is disappointment (in my case anyway) at a missed chance to innovate.
Personally I'm Mac through and through, but I would be very worried if Apple had no competition. And this LG is exactly that - no competition.
This will run windows properly, and not half arsed like bootcamp does. Bootcamp is full of (probably intended) fail. Lots of hardware things are not supported right, and any MB runs hotter and noisier under Bootcamp. To add insult to injury, given the specific level of hardware installed, it will run more slowly than on other manufacturer's systems with identical components.
So, anyone who runs windows is better off with these "knockoffs" cause at least they work properly with it.
1. Buy Mac Book Air (cheaper, seems to be same internal specs)
2. Buy a licence of Windows (bloody hell, THATS expensive compared to OSX!)
3. Install Bootcamp
4. Install Windows
5. Profit.
Oh, and I've seen MBAs drive the lovely 27" monitors just fine!
Oh, and I'm a PC / windows user, but not for much longer if Apple keep pricing things so competitively...
yeah but still that might deter some people. i'm technical and it deterred me actually (i'm very busy).
at home we completely switched to apple. just the alienware and the windows phone still exist, but i'm about to use the one only privately soon and the other will be sold - i'm switching to apple to always be able to work on xcode, to have out of the box icloud integration. just don't want to buy parallels nor windows so i'm trying to find replacements or compatibles with macos. hardware quality of apple is simply breathtaking.
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