Why can’t Apple’s notebook rivals innovate? Or: a rant about design rip-offs
Marco Arment on the Asus Zenbook (and with a less-than-subtle ‘the assbook air’ URL):
It’s sad, really, that the state-of-the-art in the PC world is attempting to copy Apple. Why isn’t Asus trying to blow the MacBook Air out of the water with something radically better?
Looking at the insides of the two devices, it’s almost criminal; it really looks like ASUS bought a MacBook Air, tore it down and told its engineers to reproduce it. The even more depressing thing: despite a bundle of cash from Intel and having Apple to use as a template, these other companies cannot match the MacBook Air. Every new ‘ultrabook’ that appears has some massive problem or other: a crappy screen, a rubbish trackpad, overheating. Of course, blogs are still banging on about the ‘Apple tax’, but when you’re paying over a grand for a notebook, would you really want to save a couple of hundred bucks by buying what almost amounts to counterfeit goods?
More to the point, this showcases problems in the tech industry as a whole. As Arment says, ASUS and other notebook makers shouldn’t be copying Apple—they should be trying to better it. And yet all we see in the market is Apple-like designs showing up a year after Apple’s released something, and often, comically, after it’s moved on to something new. Remember that rash of MacBook Pro clones when Apple unveiled the MacBook Air? Embarrassing.
The same’s true in the smartphone space. I’m hoping Samsung gets nailed to the wall worldwide in its legal spat with Apple, not because I dislike Android (despite what you may think from this blog, I don’t really care either way for the platform), but because I utterly despise the kind of lazy pilfering that goes on in the market these days. I’m sure some smart-arse will yell “XEROX! Ahuh-huh-huh” at me. Sure, because Mac OS was exactly like Xerox, and Xerox didn’t at all invite Apple over knowing full-well what it was developing and also get a ton of stock for good measure…
At any rate, Apple’s never really claimed to invent a great deal of things anyway. The company has at its best been about refinement, and its rivals never manage that. Had Asus come out with something that largely resembled the MacBook Air but somehow took it to the next level, that would have been close to the Xerox/Mac OS scenario, and that would also have been great. Something new. Something exciting. Something where you’d be saying: you know, Apple should really have created this. Instead, we just get knock-offs that do little more than dilute the original design and attempt to confuse people into buying something because it’s just like the (slightly) more expensive real deal, even though it’s clearly not.
“Something where you’d be saying: you know, Apple should really have created this.”
Exactly!
I think this piece says it all, the whole tech industry is sadly lacking ideas. I bet it took ASUS longer to think up the ‘watch’ design excuse in their marketing than to actually design this thing. I can’t believe how similar this is to the AIr design, no innovation at all, not even an attempt at pushing the idea further.