Jony Ive: Flattered by rivals' designs? Nah, its 'theft' Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as the saying goes, but Apple’s design guru and very precious genius Sir Jony Ive doesn’t see it that way - he reckons its more like robbery. The knighted creator of all things i-related was asked by an audience member at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Fran, if …
And similar sentiments. He must reeling in how shamelessly Nokia ripped off the colourful design of the iPhone 5C, Google for nicking the flat design of iOS 7 and the LG Prada for so cheekily travelling back in time and pilfering the original iPhone's touch screen. A pox on them!
is simply going back to the basics. Everything was flat, until the CPU/GPU power existed to give a UI a faux 3D look, and eventually that become all the rage just because. But just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. Ive thinks you should not, so when he got his hands on the UI he changed that. With his minimalist philosophy it is easy to see why he'd think that way.
Maybe flat design will become all the rage as everyone goes retro and then someone will go back to a 3D design as "new" again. Sort of like fashion trends like skirt lengths going up and down over the years. Stuff like the depth of a UI is a personal preference, not something for which there is one obvious "right" answer.
Stuff like the depth of a UI is a personal preference, not something for which there is one obvious "right" answer.
Which is why you should give users the choice of one or the other. I'm miffed that Yosemite is going to foist the "retro" flat Dock on us, and AFAIK there's no way to choose the 3D look.
>$deity I hope skeumorphism stays a dead fashion.
Well, it is often used as a 'stepping stone'* to introduce people to software, e.g program 'windows' are like papers on a desk.
I can see us having skeumorphic icons for Play, Mail, Paintbrush etc for some time yet.
*Even our language is skeumorphc, since we borrow words used for real objects to describe more abstract concepts.
"Everything was flat, until the CPU/GPU power existed to give a UI a faux 3D look"
no, it all begun with MacOS System 8, when the window borders and UI buttons took that 3D shape. Before that, with System 7, it was all flat. And there where no GPUs then, hey, some CPUs didn't even have the math coprocessor. You're confusing with 3D CAD, but on UIs it's only pixmaps, no GPUs needed. I even remember having installed a System 7 "extension" giving my System 7 a System 8-ish look.
it was 1995 (or 1997 ?)
Or go back to windows 3.1, where there was a distinctive 3D effect on buttons when pressed.
This "flatness" thing was (re)invented by Microsoft and the Metro interface. It's just the new rage, until the next trend comes (diagonals ? you heard it first here)
What GPUs allow is transparency, alpha-blending, translucent menus.
People see what they want to in this debate. I think there is some important principles that are rarely applied when talking about copying. It's easy and IMO deliberately disingenuous to refer to any single factors and label it as copying.
The very fact of a single factor implies no creative design effort is required. So for example, screen size is a single factor. Colour is a single factor. "Flat" is a single factor. These things are simply the building blocks of design and being "the same" on any single factor says nothing at all. Nor should it. If to re-use a material, colour or size constitutes copying and is bad, then everyone is a rip-off artist. Clearly that's nonsense.
But once multiple factors are the same we can start to take notice. Having said that, multiple factors being the same are not always a bad thing. Sometimes they are the same because we are dealing with a parody or a tribute, both of which have their clear role and their own special kind of creative merit.
But, multiple factors may also be the same in ways that are entirely conventional and required no creative input to get there. At this point in time, having a screen, a processor and RAM are an example of this. So multiple factors alone are not sufficient to declare copying.
A good creative product design sees multiple design factors combined to make a coherent entity where each of those factors is integral to and contributes to the improvement of practical feature, or create an aesthetic harmony, or most usually both. They may be combined with conventional factors as well (such as the aforementioned processor RAM and screen). That doesn't matter. It's the combination of new additive factors that are significant.
So no, Samdroids, single factor concepts like screen size are not a creative design. Nor is the concept of a "flat" user interface which has been around for a lot longer than smartphones.
THIS is an example of a multi-factor design similarity that amounts to a simple rip off where the rip-off merchant has done precious little thinking for themselves :
Rip-off second icon in the row
There are many many examples of multi-factor copying by Samsung when it comes to Apple iPhone and iOS it's hard to know where to begin. Here's just a few examples
Samsung multi-factor copying is rife
Now I know many techies don't have much in the way of creative capacity. So they tend to see a design and think, "yes, that's the solution and the obvious way to do it". But for each of the examples given in the link above, to understand the degree to which Samsung engage in multi-factor copying, just consider the Nokia equivalent. In each case it will be it's own distinct design, where a Nokia designer has spent time and honoured the customer relationship with effort and the statement to the effect I'm going to do this the Nokia way because I believe in my skill and the creative industrial production of this company.
When people say copying is the sincerest form of flattery they say it because they have little control over it and it's a positive spin to put on something that you have no real control over in life. When you have no control over such things, it's important to remain positive and look after what you can control more than what you can't. We don't say it because slavish copying is OK, or nor does it mean doing so other than for reasons of parody or tribute to the original creative, is OK either. It's little more OK than plagiarism. It's tacky, cheap and is like saying to your users, "we couldn't be bothered to present this to you on our own terms according to own design beliefs and values because frankly, we prefer theirs."
"Do you have any hard figures and reliable studies to back that up, or are you just being 'creative'?"
No I have no studies to back that up. I have eyes. I lived during the period when techies could customise Windows 3.1 with their own colours and fonts. 'Nuff said.
>Has it occurred to you that 'techies' may not be the ones designing the phone styling and look & feel of the OS?
Yes - if you want a giggle I'd recommend you visit the exhibition of students work that many design schools put on to showcase their graduates.
>"Do you have any hard figures and reliable studies to back that up,
> or are you just being 'creative'?"
>... I lived during the period when techies could customise Windows 3.1
> with their own colours and fonts. 'Nuff said.
A better example would of been the period when techies thought they were graphic designers and built their own websites... This is also one of the reasons why voice systems are in the main so appalling, techies ie. programmers, think they know better than radio script writers how to build a dialogue-based UI...
Nah, he's right, it doesn't take any creativity to design a large scale enterprise networking system or a significant piece of multiuser software, it's just a matter of rolling out the specification, which has been designed by someone else.
/s
> "Now I know many techies don't have much in the way of creative capacity."
I would rather that form followed function and that "design" was kept out of it. I would prefer that the practical considerations come first and the visual nonsense is only applied later once the important details are dealt with.
"Designers" are so full of themselves claiming ownership on simple things that require no real creativity at all.
Most of the features that Samsung ' copied' in the blood linked to seem to be vast improvements on the Apple designs (the on-screen keyboard especially, which after eight iterations of iOS is still diabolical).
This self belief in Apple's unwavering originality and innovation doesn't seem to be isolated to the hallowed wakes of Cupertino either. Just this afternoon the bloke in front of me at the rugby (go Saints!) was dissing the man in the seat next to him for owning a HTC One M8 which was a apparently a shameless facsimile of his iPhone 6. Yet another example of the lengths that Apple's competitors will go to in bending the space time continuum just to nick fruity ideas.
"Most of the features that Samsung ' copied' in the blood linked to seem to be vast improvements on the Apple designs"
Next post: my impossible to prove but nevertheless sincerely felt belief that for many techies, design taste is like the colour "red" to people with Deuteranopia.
It also ignores one of the things that Apple actually does do quite well - I don't rate them as all that innovative, personally (This is the company that sued MS for stealing the stuff _they_ stole from PARC, remember) - but it'd be foolish to deny Apple's talents as system integrators. Getting all of the stuff that other people invented to work together well is an important skillset of it's own, but because of the insistence on maintaining the "Apple invented the helicopter" thing they've got going on they completely ignore this (I think) fundamental aspect of their business.
It doesn't matter if they "stole" it or "bought" it. The result is the same. They cribbed it from someone else. They did not invent it. They merely took someone else's stuff and reused it.
Apple like Microsoft are both great at watching the innovators flounder. Then they swoop down like vultures when everyone else has done the hard work trying to push the technology forward. They steal or buy stuff and then run the real risk takers out of business.
BTW, I don't agree with all the examples given in the second link. Namely, the MacBook Air "copy," USB Connector "copy" and camera connection copy and possibly the iPad "copy". It seems to me in those cases the conventional arrangement argument I've given above applies sufficiently that the similarity with Apple applies only as a single factor or at least is not particularly onerous and they can't clearly be called rip-offs.
"BTW, I don't agree with all the examples given in the second link."
I think there are rather more exceptions than you allow.
Taking the first one, iPhone 3G, once you get past the shape about the only striking resemblance in detail is that they both have an icon of a phone handset on a green background on the bottom left. The shape? They're both rectangles with a similar size & shape with rounded edges. Why? I don't suppose Fanbois & Samdroids have different proportions or sizes of hands & face and people have been rounding off edges at least since the neolithic when they started applying retouch to the edges of flint blades.
Next, the iPad2: different aspect ratios, totally different screen layouts - where's the dock on the Sammy?, bits & pieces in the bezel.
And so on.
@SuccessCase - You lost me at "there IS some important principleS" and "any SINGLE factorS and label IT as copying".
Your butchery of grammar rules related to the use of plurals is hurting my tiny creative brain. And I don't own a Sammy (besides a cheap Chromebook my daughter stole from me) or any Sammy stock, so beat them up all you like. I'm sure they are just stealing rounded corners and bouncy icons all over the place - real important stuff. But please get your verbs and nouns to match up.
>> Samsung multi-factor copying is rife
And the problem with all such "studies", all such fan compiled accusation lists is they ALL start with the blind assumption that the Apple design is the first ever design of it's type. They never look for prior art. They never look for the things Ive's used as inspiration (never to admit) before he then accuses others of copying.
This is important as:
Apple invented it, Apple made it successful, Samsung copied Apple
Sounds an awful lot worse than:
Apple copied it, Apple had success with it, Samsung copied it to.
I take it you are not a 'techie'. I have worked in product design almost my entire life and I need to deploy creative and tehcnical skills. In my experience the only people who think engineers and scientists are not creative are those who are ignorant and/or incapable of technical work and lack the imagination to see why creativity is important in technical fields.
In other words those who are both ignorant and stupid.
In the wider debate about Apple the reason they get such a hostile reception is that they managed to claim as their own design elements they themselves copied and which were well established before they entered the market. This reduces innovation and the ability to be creative.
The B&O design language (or more correctly that of the individual involved) is straight lines. If B&O designed any Apple device, it would look massively different.
B&O has other design elements to be sure, but the predominant visual one is straight lines - Jacob Jensen design house.
There are a few curves in recent years, this is seen as a radical departure from their otherwise consistent design language.
And Samsung got the IPhone design, time travelled back before the IPhone came out and released a phone. Those bastards!
(As I recall, Samsung showed photos of one of their phones with design elements Apple claimed were copied from IPhone... but the Samsung had already been out for 6 months! Samsung's lawyers made a procedural error and Apple got this declared inadmissable.)
Another good reason not to buy Apple products. I won't support a company that tries to go sue anybody that ends up with a vaguely similar looking product. The hardware or software (if proprietary) was copied outright? That's not theft (unless they stole a prototype) and Ive sounds like an idiot abusing the term theft for things that are not theft; but this is nevertheless a serious legal problem. Ending up with a product that vaguely looks like another product? Suck it up guys.
Given the number of products Samsung releases, it is a cinch they'd have something that matches almost anything. I'd be not at all shocked if Samsung has released something like that goofy square Blackberry phone at some point.
There's a difference between having one product that you sell a few thousand of and then forget, and making it the basis of your whole product line.
"Given the number of products Samsung releases, it is a cinch they'd have something that matches almost anything. I'd be not at all shocked if Samsung has released something like that goofy square Blackberry phone at some point."
With some artistic licence in terms of how similar they look, they did.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/26/review_samsung_p300/
Thanks El Reg for the article.
I only remember that there were a few sites on the Internet showing a website from a 2006 tradeshow where Samsung had "copied" lots of things that were part of the iPhone when that was released in 2007. Except that someone had doctored the numbers on these sites, and the images were really from 2007; pictures from Samsung phones of the real 2006 trade show looked nothing like an iPhone.
Wellll.... Making the film prop into reality has been a neat feat of engineering and technical design. As for the actual look of the thing... Well yes, I think you could credit Roddenbury ( or whoever came up with it in the prop department) for that.
But it sure as hell wasn't Apple that came out with the first flip-phone.. I think it was Nokia or Ericsson who came up with that one.
"So a fake prop from a sci fi show consists of prior art in your world?
They count every bit as much as all those bullshit patents of things that have allready been invented, but still legally belong to the new owners because they haven't been documented within the US borked patent system before.
You know, like the "wheel", and "curved corners".
Th curved corners are what the US calls a "design patent" and we, more logically, call a "registered design". The rules include that a registered design must "be new". You cannot include anything inventive in a registered design.
So a fake prop from a sci fi show is definitely prior art for a design, as it does not need to be functional and it has been widely published.
I believe it took the Australian patent office to allow the patenting of the wheel. Of course at the time it actually was novel in Australia (snark). But it can't be patented anywhere else. Just because no explicit patent exists for a wheel in the US or the EU doesn't matter, because other patents contain wheels as part of mechanisms.
Section 1B applies as regards novelty
Section 1C applies in that technical functions cannot be registered as part of a design.
It's pretty clear, and has been around since 1949, but an awful lot of people seem not to know about it.
We aren't talking about Holo-frikking-decks we're talking about the shape of a tablet or the flat design of a UI.
And lets make this clear, a real holodeck would involve 10,000 extremely technical and brilliant new patents on a myriad of subjects. But if the company that managed all that brought it to market and made it look exactly like the inside of the ST:TNG one when it was off and then tried to claim the design for their own and said nobody else could copy it?
Then the sci-fi show WOULD be legitimate prior art and hopefully they'd be told to shove it.
No matter what any designer wants to think about his/her designs, function to a large degree has to dictate form.
A watch has to fit on a wrist, not be too heavy but big enough in this cast to read a screen so the upper and lower limits are not going to be very different from on manufacturer to another, then we get down to the arty part round corners or square etc. Very square corners may not be very appealing to look at and may catch on clothing so it's probably going to be rounded.
Any designer is sooner or later going to come to similar conclusions for similar items so really they are limited to colour , texture and material which are still dictated to some degree by function.
A lot of good engineers design as well or better than many 'Designers ' simply because they understand what dictates an elegant functioning piece of equipment, successful as he is Ive is no Conran.
If he doesn't like that he can sue me.
>function to a large degree has to dictate form.
> Very square corners may not be very appealing to look at and may catch on clothing so it's probably going to be rounded.
Basically, a cigarette case lays the template for items designed to be carried in a pocket.
You should learn the history of the automobile - it was one giant patent race and there was plenty of litigation over things you would today claim "obvious" - mainly because almost everything is obvious if you have seen it before.
FFS, the air brake is so fucking obvious it should never have been patentable!
>I think they ignored rules 7,8 and 9
@ Alan Welk
How are Apple any worse than any other mobile phone vendor on these points?
7. Is long-lasting
Phones tend to be replaced by newer models before they fail. Batteries can be replaced for less than £30. The user can buy a case to suit their environment should they choose, from an Otterbox to a wallet case. The OS is updated for several years after the phone's sale.
8. Is thorough down to the last detail
I don't see any glaringly arbitrary design choices in Apple stuff. They make decisions that might not suit you, or me, but they have made concious decisions during the design process.
9. Is environmentally friendly
No new mobile phone is environmentally friendly, if it is being compared to just using your existing phone.
My next phone will be a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact.
>I would've loved to have seen what Jonny Ive came up with if he only 'applied' Dieter's principles without seeing any of his work.
Ive was first known for the Bondi Blue iMac. It doesn't superficially resemble any of Rams' work, though it follows Rams' principles.
The iMac was a product of its time. 3D solid-modelling CAD and Simulation software matured so that more 'organic' forms, such as the iMac's case, could be modelled and manufactured. Without these CAD tools, the iMac's development time woud have been much longer.
Ive's first product to resemble a Ram's object was the iPod. The constraints were the two major internal components - the HDD and required battery. The back of it resembles a cigarette case, and the front is largely defined by the user interface, i.e the screen and wheel.
Anyway, Rams wasn't the only 'form engineer' of the 1950s... check out this Zeiss Jena Werra MK1 camera:
http://leavemehere.wordpress.com/2010/06/11/werra/
If Ive was designing electric shavers and other products that Rams did, then you'd have a point. It is one thing to be inspired by the design of something in a completely different category from decades ago, it is not the same as being "inspired" by the design of something in the same product category that came out a year or two earlier.
Dieter Rams in turn copied Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe to name but two. He was clearly and heavily influence by the ideals of the Baauhaus and the architectural 'Moderne' movement which has been misrepresented as 'minimalism' since. Besides, Rams himself identifies Ive and Apple as one of the only businesses in the world currently that 'get' design. But hey, keep those gums a flappin'.
Upvoted, but Kubrick and Clarke were there before.
Anecdotically, they also described a device with all the functionalities of a smartphone in "The lost worlds of 2001". From memory, a small device that was a (wireless) phone, a camera with flash and video, and a computer with messaging at the same time, and that was used by 'people' in an alien crowd to record the arrival of their first human visitors.
I've commented on this 'smartphone' several times at several forums. This is because I still find difficult to believe the extreme precision with which they forecasted a technology that was ~35 years in their future. Kudos to them.
"I've commented on this 'smartphone' several times at several forums. This is because I still find difficult to believe the extreme precision with which they forecasted a technology that was ~35 years in their future."
I'm always impressed by Bradbury, who in 1953 managed to predict that the main use of mobile phones would be to annoy people on public transport.
The idea of minaturization in general was pretty common in the 50s. Pretty much anyone that read sci-fi in the 60s, 70s, or 80s could see stuff like the iDevices coming and probably imagined a number of their own that looked like "shameless Apple copies".
I thought up some "shameless Apple copies" of my own in the 80s. (Inspired by Asimov)
I wonder which came first - the god-awful plain white-is-good layout of YouTube, or iOS7's white-is-good plainness?
Isn't the function partially dictated by the available technology? For example, while feature phones from way back could run Java applets, a true smartphone needed sufficient processing and memory available to make it functional, plus a touch based interface so we aren't saddled with trying to do stuff using a phone keypad (remember "T9" predictive text?). Plus, of course, displays with resolutions akin to early laptops (and better) because 128x128 is about suitable for WAP and not much else.
Please, for the love of God, Apple, copy Android and make your keyboard display lower case when not in caps. Or, as this might be too shocking for iFans, make it an option.
Actually, iOS is really crying out for a skinnable interface (OMFG - user options! nooo!). Bright light hurts my eyes so I prefer to work in a low-light environment. I would like the keyboard to be black/grey like it is when you go to search, but most of the time everything is WHITE. Thankfully there is, at least, a workaround, you can set a treble-press of the home button to invert the display.
Thing is, very few things are complete innovations. Most things are improvements on what has come before. Now Ives might see Samsung as ripping off iThingies, but maybe they see it as improving upon them? What is Apple going to do to raise the bar? And the bar needs to be raised, as resting on laurels has killed companies in the past. You're the market leader only until somebody builds a better mousetrap, then it is up to you to one-up that. That's how it works.
"Please, for the love of God, Apple, copy Android and make your keyboard display lower case when not in caps. Or, as this might be too shocking for iFans, make it an option."
My Nokia N9 has this. It is one of the last pieces of skeuomorphism left in iOS and I am actually surprised that it did not disappear in iOS7.
Its almost always the available technology, those with early access tend to get the patents nowadays by having lawyers on staff to help document and disguise the bleedin obvious to 'anyone skilled in the art'. Recently encountered a sketch I made in 1984 showing what looks spookily like an iPad (flat icons, but slab had rounded corners) except with a touch sensitive trackpad below the screen and the question "how to use the screen itself to track?" - I was working R&D for a manufacturer at the time - an era before people bothered much about patenting and quite rightly thought of this kind of thing as obvious, only the mechanics of the finger detector a subject for patents.
If anyone in device design can be described as a thief, its the person who takes obvious applications of a technology and uses a broken patent system to steal from us the human right to invent.
Understand that Jobs himself was quoting, and what was meant. See http://www.creativethinkinghub.com/creative-thinking-and-stealing-like-an-artist/
If Samsung had taken Apple's ideas and spun them into something uniquely different then I don't think that Ive would have been annoyed. It's that spinning that takes time and effort (tablet machines had existed for years before the iPad, but it was significantly different too them). Samsung went the Good Artist route.
"Originality is undetected plagiarism."
- William Ralph Inge
The late great 20th century was a true Renaissance of invention and creativity. There are so many good to great ideas that were too far ahead of their time and are just now being resurrected.
As quite a few posters have already stated, you can only do so much when the function (and I might add "available technology and science") dictates the form. Many a sci fi joke has been made about people from the past who land in the future and mistake a kettle for a DVD player. Or vice versa.
In part I agree with him, it's hard when you spend time to try to do something creative and others see it and simply copy it, however this is the real world where it's not always fair and unless it's an exact, direct copy, you have to take it with a pinch of salt and ensure people know ( or are made to believe! ) you got there first. He should stop believing his own mythos and start knuckling down again. He might have wowed Steve but he needs to realise the world is a nasty place sometimes, send in the lawyers if you're that convinced you've been ripped-off, else shut up and spend more time designing and less time whinging.
The man's a fool:
by admitting his anger and fear of being copied, he has inadvertently endorsed his competition's offerings - to all but brand conscious snobs - as means for people on a limited budget to attain the same value for less of their scarce funds. His only rational response would have been to show supreme confidence in his own alleged creativity and innovation by dismissing the competition as beneath concern or threat. That he would shoot off his mouth, verbally shooting himself in the foot, only betrays his own lack of confidence in the real value of his brand, in his own worth and in his company's future.
I'd love to know exactly what Ive's and the design crew actually designed. Was it the philosophical arguments about the radius of the corners being 0.55" or 0.53" and the shade of blue being Pantone number whatever or...
Did they give the engineers a set of sketches saying we want the software to look like this and work this way. If I was an Apple core software writer I'd make damn sure my software was flexible enough to soak up the last design input the guys in Red-Rimmed glasses came up with, with minimal changes to get it out of the door.
Design is important, but my appreciation is for the people who take the charcoal sketch of a car a garment or a piece of hardware\software and translate that into an engineering drawing or CAD file that actually drives the manufacturing process..
I remember once a documentary about the Lotus Elise and it's Desginers moaning the engineers had stuck a small spoiler on the boot breaking the rasion d'etre of their design. And why had the engineers committed such a crime. The "pure design" was aerodynamically unstable at speed.. Mind you it looked great standing still, as all sportscars do ??
"I remember once a documentary about the Lotus Elise and it's Desginers moaning the engineers had stuck a small spoiler on the boot breaking the rasion d'etre of their design. And why had the engineers committed such a crime. The "pure design" was aerodynamically unstable at speed.. Mind you it looked great standing still, as all sportscars do ??"
Audi TT - no spoiler, unstable. Artistic design wins, aerodynamics loses, cars crash.
In the end, the "correct" engineering decisions need to be made. But these are just examples of many.
That other German company had spiffy looking silver race cars that kept getting airborne as well, a failure of engineering/aerodynamics - I don't think a lot of artistic input goes into race cars, but maybe that was the cause after all?
Yes, but isn't car design a combination of what the designer thinks, what the presses can actually form, what is necessary to prevent moisture traps, and what is dictated by safety?
Car designers can't afford to be too precious if they want to stay employed.
Having been in both hardware and the software industry I have seen some very creative stuff being designed every day, and every year a new bunch of great designers leave university to enter the world only to have their designs turned down as to "Radical" or "Over Engineered" only to see that very same line manager following fashion (Fruit) or worse they are waiting for "That Fruit Company" latest design to arrive. It can be very frustrating to find your designs being used by the "Right Company" years after you showed the concept to your own line manager who turned it down.
Shout and scream all you want about who made what and when, its all politics when it comes down to great design finding its way into the public eye. Check out the university showcases and you will see what Im talking about.
It is a bit ironic coming from the man who's entire design language was a carbon copy of what Braun did many years ago and continues to nick design ideas from everyone around him such as the Apple watch scroll wheel stolen from Braun's watch or the back of the iphone 6/+ a flattened carbon copy of the HTC M8 back, right down to the exact position of the antenna lines.
So he was talking about Xiaomi Mi 4 right? Why did he think it was a copy? Because it was a phone that came in white and black colors and had a chamfered metal rim. It didn’t matter that that’s where the similarities ended with the other phone having different buttons, actual capacitive keys instead of that tired home button, different bottom speaker design, used USB not Lightning, had the headphone jack at the top, didn’t have a lock switch and even had a 100% unrelatable back with a different camera placed in a place no iPhone ever places their camera.
It was "theft" then. So what would Jony Ive have to say now with the release of the iPhone X? Since bezel less is the trend this year it does make sense for Apple to follow along but the thing is the phone that started everybody down on this trend just happens to have come from the same company he called “thieves.” The Xiaomi Mi MIX released in 2016 over a year before Apple made the iPhone X available for purchase. And of course if we follow along with Ive's guidelines on what counts as a copycat it would have been enough for the phone to just be bezel less alone right? After all according to Ive a copycat just has to make the phone bear one of the original’s main traits like a metal rim or a bezel less one. So just like the company was a copycat of Apple for having a phone with a chamfered metal rim the same can be said about Apple’s iPhone X being nothing more than theft of the bezel less phone that started the trend over a year ago.
But the sad truth is that there’s more. Not only was the bezel less design stolen directly from Xiaomi but the actual design from start to finish came straight from the company. The “notch” that caused a stir in the American smartphone community was considered when a sequel was going to be made for the original company’s bezel less phone. Due to poor fan feedback the design was scrapped for an updated version of the original design.
A working model was never made but one of the company’s display suppliers worked up a prototype
https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-cfeceb0d9d8d207e792bbad06982f3b5.webp
Look familiar? Well minus the huge 3mm rim that Apple came up with. This rim is similar to the original phone’s which was under 2mm.
And even better is Jony Ive admitting that the iPhone X took 5 years to create. Exactly how long it really took Xiaomi and its designer Philippe Starck to design the Mi MIX. Looks like Apple still have a lot of faith in their marketing power if they could blatantly state they stole something that took 5 years for a smaller less profitable company to design. Shame on you Mr. Ive. I hope more people realize just how disgusting of a liar you are.
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