A lot has been said recently about Samsung, HP and others copying designs for Apple products pretty much wholesale. Today I came across this video. It’s a couple of months old, but it had me cringing so much that I decided to write about it. The language and awkwardness is painful. I dare you to find an “uh” in an Apple product video. Enough is enough.

With their new laptop series, not only did HP rip off the unibody MacBook Pro, they’re apparently also attempting to copy the way that Apple presents its products, and hilariously, even the people. Here are a few comparison screenshots to illustrate my point:

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Even the funny faces got copied!
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I’ve also helpfully transcribed the entire video.  Painful language and grammar is unchanged.

So for ENVY, uh what’s really nice is we’re now in what I’d call the second generation of design.

The first models didn’t succeed because we didn’t copy Apple close enough, I guess, so we took another shot at it!

Well I think there was three uh main goals with design when we started the new product line for ENVY, uh the first goal was to create a super-clean, high end design, and we did that in the geometry that we chose. If you look at the geometry the geometry is rooted in very clean, simple shapes.

Just like Apple’s! Apple is still marketing their stuff as “simple”, right? Also, how many times did that guy just say geometry in a row?

The second one was a level of honesty that was really uh a key goal, the materials that we used, um were really true to um this this core attribute of honesty, we wanted the aluminum that was there in the design to come through. The last one was really key as we brought Beats Audio into the the ENVY landscape. we wanted to uh take it beyond the first generation of ENVY products, we wanted to visualize the audio, we wanted to go beyond just the uh the the uh the the sense or the the audible sound of of Beats with ENVY.

Honestly, we just looked at the materials that Apple uses, and made it look like that. People like the word “honestly”, right? That’ll make em trust us!

What is this guy even saying?

You’ll notice on the product that we integrated a volume wheel that has what I call interaction gravity. And that interaction gravity is what pulls people into the product to interact with it.

Did he seriously just make up a new buzz-phrase and then use the root word in it to define it? Wow.

And it sits in in a very dominant spot on the on the keyboard uh and it allows the user a finite control of audio.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Your selling point is that you have introduced a dial from a 90′s era Walkman into a new laptop and that it has limited control? I think you meant fine, or even fine-grained. Finite makes no sense. Secondly, I’ve had a rotary volume control on a stereo before. Get a grain of dust in there and see how well that works. Hope you like scratchy volume adjustment!

It’s it feels a lot like a um like a high end stereo knob and that’s something that we prototyped time and time again throughout this process so that we got that sense of quality. The audio piece is a huge part of this story um the ENVY products, 15 and 17 have probably the best audio in the entire industry.

I love the certainty here.

Um the key thing about the the ENVY category is it’s always about this level of luxury but a balance of performance. ENVY is about the beauty in the details. It has a very clean and simple design but it has that next layer of design when you start to engage it. When you open it up it’s a little like Christmas in that there’s um quite a few things inside the product that really draw your attention. Things like uh color accents that tie us into the Beats Audio and that little touch of of color just adds that signature iconic feel to the product. Once you get past the initial look and feel of the product, which is gorgeous, um there is uh a deeper level of design that is part of the discovery process.

We took a different approach in designing the keyboard. once is it had to have the great functionality so the ergonomics, the human factors of the keyboard are just perfect, but beyond just the pure function we wanted to have a little level of surprise. if you look at the rest of the industry, backlit keyboards tend to be powered by 4 LEDs.

What we did with this product was very unique. We took an LED per key. and these LEDs per key allow us 2 things. One is um it it allows us to illuminate the keyboard in in a beautiful, um perfect way but beyond that we are also able to take that technology and give it a human nature, what I mean by that is that when you approach the notebook, the LEDs actually cascade across the keys, meaning that when you approach, it actually welcomes you.

I’ve personally taken apart one of the Apple backlit keyboards before. There are light pipes across the entire bottom of the keyboard which look a lot like fiber-optics, and they spread out the light fairly evenly, much like a LED backlit display does. I bet the Apple version saves on battery comparatively too, because it’s 4 LEDs vs what, 88 on the ENVY at least? Thanks for bringing true innovation to the industry, HP. Less is more.

The touchpad is another example of where we’ve incorporated an advanced technology and this involves a much higher resolution uh sensor technology in the touchpad uh than we’ve ever done before.

Synaptics, who makes our trackpads, put multi-touch in the new ones, so I guess we have that now. I just found out what multi-touch is yesterday.

It can sense more fingers, so as we look to uh users doing more gestures with that level of interface, we see the need for it and we’ve incorporated it in the design, so again between the keyboard and the touchpad, the usability on the new ENVYs is just outstanding

We’ve seen people using multi-touch on MacBooks for awhile, so we did it as well.

The key thing you have to think about is the computer has moved from just um a a a piece of technology to now the center of our lifestyle, um we’ve put a lot of features into the product both I’d say obvious and some hidden, so that there’s always I think a level of discovery um from things like color accents to second functions on certain areas of the design so that um it it grows with you.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the first part of this before. Oh yeah it was Steve Jobs in 2001!

It’s one that certainly HP is most proud of in that um it’s the best that HP has to offer.

We’re flat out telling you that the best thing we make is something that we copied wholesale from another company, please buy ours instead! It has red accents, man!)

ENVY is probably the most appropriate name I could imagine for HP’s product line.

I can think of a few others, give me a call!

It’s a product that quickens the pulse.

Well, it does make some people’s blood boil.

It’s a product that creates envy.

Envy of what exactly?

So to sum up, this video highlights the following ground-breaking features:

1. A laptop that basically looks like a MacBook Pro, and which is made out of the same material.

2. A 1990′s era volume wheel that sticks out of the side of the computer and has “interaction gravity” so you can… interact with it.

3. Red highlights.

4. A multi-touch trackpad, which Macs have had for years

5. A backlit keyboard that has an LED under each key, which I’m sure is great for battery life.

You aren’t going to beat Apple by copying their designs. You aren’t going to beat Apple by playing a game they’ve already set the rules of. You aren’t going to beat Apple by making product videos that attempt to copy their style but which highlight things that don’t need to be highlighted (They spent almost an entire minute of a 5 minute video talking about a volume knob, for goodness sake! They would have done better if they hadn’t even made this video.) Change the game. Do something different. Don’t try to convince people that your copy is better than the real thing. Give us a break.