...than Bain. Or, any other vulture capitalist.

And, Apple fanboys are Hitler Youth.

On edit. Really?? There's someone who is trying to prove that HP is ripping off Apple... by showing a downsized white keyboard in front of a widescreen monitor???

Its pretty obvious. I, too, initially thought Apple was out to destroy the competition, but Samsung tried to take advantage of the situation and got caught. No sympathy here.

With Win7 and Linux Mint partitions, along with enough space for additional Linux distro experimenting.

Now I think the makers of Mister Mic should sue the Karaoke manufacturers.

I'll be back to pick you up later!

The black flatscreen all-in-one was around long before the current iMac design. Heck, as I recall, Gateway was selling them back when iMac's still looked like gumdrops. The black frame and silver stand has been a design mainstay since the advent of the LCD monitor. FWIW, I'm staring at a 24" Dell Ultrasharp that looks more like that iMac than the HP does. My old black and silver Dell XPS One, which was released before the aluminum iMac, used a similar design.

As for the keyboard, it was neither innovated nor designed by Apple. The "chiclet" style keyboards have been around since the 1970's(!) and have been used on everything from Commodores, to Amigas, to more PC's than I can count, until they finally fell out of favor in the early 90's (IBM clicky-keys FTW!) While Apple may have helped to revive their popularity, doing so gives Apple no particular legal claim on their use, and chiclet keyboards have been showing up on PC's and PC laptops again for the past few years.

If Apple were dumb enough to sue HP over the design (and I'd be shocked if they were), Apple would not only lose, but California's tort abuse laws would allow HP to extract quite a bit of money from Apple for wasting their time. Apple would literally be laughed out of court.

I'll tell you. Samsung and Google and others will be paying Apple billions for years.

"We did not look at any of the old stuff" means they failed to do their job. The amount of prior art is legion.

Do you just read the Mac fan sites for your news, or do you actually understand the intricacies of the case? First off, very little of the Apple case against Samsung had anything to do with Google. The media made a big deal out of the possibility, but Steve Jobs himself would have filed the papers to sue Google if they thought they had a case. The two exceptions are items that are trivial to the operating systems (like, when you're scrolling and hit the bottom of a list, the screen BOUNCES instead of stops...wooo, innovation). As none of the potential Apple claims against Google are for core technologies or design concepts, none would merit more than a token judgment (maybe a few million as "compensation".)

Besides all that, we'll see where this really ends up. The jurors have already admitted that they didn't consider prior art, which was the basis of Samsung's entire defense claim. Samsung is appealing, and if they can get their prior art claims properly heard, it's still possible that the jury judgment may be reversed. On top of that, several of the involved patents are currently being reviewed by the USPTO over complaints unrelated to this case. If the USPTO finds that the patents are either obvious or didn't properly cite prior art (large possibilities in both cases), the patents will be revoked. If that happens, any court judgments based on them will be vacated. It will be several years yet before the dust settles and a final verdict in the case is reached (and Apple had better hope they win...if the judgment gets reversed, Samsung will be able to extract billions from them for lost sales).

None of this is particularly relevant to this particular topic though. Apple's home field advantage would be lost in any fight with HP, and HP could literally dump truckloads of prior art examples on the courts front door. I'm no fan of Apple, but even I don't think they would be dumb enough to tackle HP over something as generic as "black and silver flatscreen with chiclet keyboard", no matter how much their salivating Internet fans would like to see it happen. There's just too much prior art from too many different companies. Apple's current iMac design is actually pretty generic, and the only thing that really sets it apart is the aluminum band across the bottom of the screen. That's the only really distinctive feature of the design, and it's not-so-coincidentally also the only major feature of their design that nobody else has copied.

As for extracting money from Apple, California law is pretty clear. If one company sues another over something the court later deems frivolous, the company filing the suit can be forced to pay substantial damages to the target of the suit as compensation for their wasted time and legal expenses. Claiming trademark on silver and metal flatscreens, when it was a standard design concept long before Apple started building them, would certainly qualify as frivolous.

I just think it's funny that flailing companies, and not so flailing companies (see Google, Amazon), can only innovate by copying Apple.

Oh, how times have changed...

For instance, I am indeed an old school Apple 'Fan Boy.' But 95% of the current users of Apple products since those days, are not 'fan boys,' but just like things that are designed well and 'just work.'

Whether we're talking slab phones or oversized Web 2.0 texboxes, the simple reality is that visual design has always been about following the herd. This has been particularly true of the computer industry. I remember when building everything into the keyboard was the fad. Then everyone started building boxes that sat under your monitor. Suddenly, everyone started tipping them up and the white minitower became the staple. For a while there in the early 90's, the "bigger is better" mentality took over and mid to full towers stormed the market from every manufacturer. Almost overnight, the design standards shifted again, and small black towers displaced the tall beige middies.

The concept holds true for everything from computers to cars to houses to skyscrapers. You have a small number of design innovators, and then you have the lemmings who chase after them and build their own "interpretations" of the concept.

As for the innovation question...I guess that really depends on what you consider to be innovation. Shortly after he died, I heard a great comparison between Steve Jobs and Henry Ford. Ford didn't invent the gas powered engine. He didn't invent the automobile. He didn't invent the assembly line. What he did was to take inventions developed by other people, combine them together, design simplified versions for the "common man", and then market the hell out of them. Was Henry Ford an inventor? No. Technically, he didn't invent anything that didn't already exist. He simply had a unique insight into how to combine, present, and then sell those inventions to the public. Was he an innovator? Technically, the definition of innovator is someone who invents something new, so the answer is NO. On the flip side, like Steve Jobs, maybe his innovation was simply a new way of looking at things. If you take that perspective, then yes, Apple is an innovative company.

But, for me, Apple doesn't work. Never has. The technology just doesn't fit my needs.

But can you really patent the shape/hardware integration of a computer? I imagine the OS can be patented. But this, really? And I'm an Apple guy. But maybe I'm wrong, and HP is dumb. I don't know.
If I was apple, I would not care. HP sux now.

Seriously, I'm not seeing what's supposed to be the big deal here.

PB

All in one, full PC hardware fronted by a LCD-TFT flatscreen.
If any company could be worse than Microsoft, it would be Crapple.

Fuck You Apple too

what the hell happened to antitrust regulations?

especially a big FU to Microsoft

Apple originally included the F700 in their lawsuit against Samsung, claiming that it was an infringing product based off their design. By Apple's own admission, it was a product that "infringed" on the very design concepts they were suing over and claiming ownership of.

Apple dropped their claim on the F700 when Samsung made the mistake of pointing out that the F700 was designed long before the iPhone details were released, and they even had FCC and Korean government license filings to prove it (Samsung REALLY should have saved that bombshell for the courtroom.) Apple's lawyers realized that it would be impossible to claim that they invented rounded corners and slotted ear holes when Samsung had designed a visually similar device only months beforehand.

For the judge (at Apple's request) to then turn around and refuse to allow Samsung to present the phone to the jury, after Apple had originally included it in the case, was indefensible. It was clearly a piece of evidence that could have changed the direction of the entire case, and for the judge to exclude it for no other reason than to SAVE THE COURTS TIME was astounding.

is Win 8. I just recently installed a copy on a system, and the top photo is of the new Metro Interface. So it would be Apple vrs. Microsoft-HP. HP has made Imac like machines for quite some time, all running a version of Windows or Linux.