Coincidence Or Stolen Design?
from the I-vote-for-coincidence dept
Some guy in Belgium is pissed. 6 months ago he drew a picture of a possible iMac desgin that he thinks looks too much like the real iMac. He had even sent the drawing to Apple. At least he’s not going to sue or anything. I heard that there’s a coffee table book of Apple Design from a while back that includes a “Luxo” design, which is a laptop screen on top of a flexible Luxo lamp arm, with a small base that holds the rest of the system. That sounds like the real inspiration for the new iMac.
Comments on “Coincidence Or Stolen Design?”
Six months from sketch to finished product...?
From the Wired article:
“The design was logical,” he said. “They made a cube and a tower. I was sure they would make something spherical. I know them too well.”
That could also be read as “based on the history of Apple’s designs, I drew up something that I thought they might do. I was right, and now I’m annoyed that I was right.”
At any rate, think about the other issues involved in building this machine. The motherboards and some other components in the new imacs are custom fabricated — it’s unlikely, to say the least, that someone at Apple saw this design in June, got it approved in place of whatever they were planning up to that point, did the actual hardware design, got suppliers to fabricate all the components, built, and tested the thing in time for a January release…
Re: Six months from sketch to finished product...?
Yeah, this is more just pleasant coincidence. All the reports indicate they’ve been working on this thing ever since the introduction of the previous iMac, and just no way did they see the sketch, scrap their previous designs and start in on this.
Besides, I think mhh5 sent Apple an idea once, and they returned it without ever even reading it for fear of lawsuits or that kind of thing.
msykes
If you give a thousand monkeys.....
a thousand pens and a thousand sketch books, in a thousand years they’ll draw the next iMac! 🙂