Looks really nice. Reminds me of the Surface Book (minus the tablet stuff). Can't wait for the rumored i7 model.
Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
381–390 of 462 posts
Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're talking about the Jony Ive who designs rectangles? Meh. Him and Apple have stolen plenty! Isn't Steve Jobs famously quoted as saying "great artists steal"? Anyway, what's the fucking difference if you steal a few pieces here and there or the whole thing? Nothing. (EDIT: A piece of something is still a whole piece that you've stolen. And Apple has also stolen entire apps, like Konfabulator. They get no sympathy…
Apple literally redefined what a smart phone is. While he borrowed design cues from history, Braun in particular, applying that to the phone space and coming up with a design language that had durability was a big breakthrough. Remember in 2006 Nokia, Motorola, RIM and others made literally everything but rectangular phones. They were covered in buttons and other crap. Ive's vision of a virtually button free phone wa…
The Sony Ericsson P800/P900/P910 had a removable keypad making them effectively rectangular phones. The Neonode N1 had a touch driven interface, including the slide to unlock feature. Then there were PDAs like Sony Clie PEG-TH55. All this a couple of years before the iPhone.
The reason phones didn't look like rectangles wasn't because no one had the idea, but because screens were expensive and touch technology (and other technologies like data) wasn't mature yet. That's why you had something like the LG Prada come out at the same time (or even slightly before) the iPhone.
Just because you are first to adopt something (e.g. because your customers don't mind paying a premium and you've secretly developed it for years including controlling the supply chain) doesn't mean you should have the sole right to use a concept derived from evolution of components.
P910 http://pdadb.net/img/sony_ericsson_p910.jpg
Neonode N1 http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/Neonode_N1_Sept_2004.jpg
Sony Clie PEG-TH55 https://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2010/08/03/b26d3392-67c...
LG Prada http://image.cellphones.ca/images/phones/74/767/lg-prada-ful...
Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#383I've been looking for a new laptop recently, but I can't seem to find a good. My primary concerns are: - not to have open it up and clean from dust. That's what all of my laptops, except Air, suffered from. They get dust inside and then get hot and loud. I move around a lot and it's inevitable. I don't want noise and I want as little heat as possible. - Multitouch Trackpad like on Macbook Air. It's wonderful! - Long…
Why are you looking for a MB Air-replacement when you want a MB Air?
Imagine using a <1080p screen in 2016.
Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting, because when I've got my Xiaomi Mi3 I've compared it with my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Mi3 was rooted, had almost no crapware and allowed me to pick what permissions app gets. On the other hand Tab required Samsung Account and rooting it voided guarantee. Mi Band vibrates on incoming connection, sms and apps so maybe that's why it requires permissions to phone, sms and notifications.
Take a look at the permissions required by the official "Mi Fit" app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.xiaomi.hm.... ) vs the indie "Tools & Mi Band" app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.zdenekhorak... ). The official app has more features admittedly, but nothing that justifies the level of permissions it asks for. At most it should need access to the camera/photos to allow you to…
Even better is Gadgetbridge (available on F-droid): https://github.com/Freeyourgadget/Gadgetbridge
It's not as slick as the official app, but requires much less in the way of permissions and is more flexible.
Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#385This quote from Jony Ive really made me feel for the guy: “When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s going to work. You spend seven or eight years working on something, and then it’s copied. I have to be honest, the first thing I can think, all those weekends that I could have at home with my family but didn’t. I think it’s theft, and it’s lazy.” Xiaomi have done this to others. Their new ai…
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Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine at least some of the additional cost comes from putting in the work to create the original product in the first place. If Xiaomi can just come along and clone an already successful air filter with a proven market, it doesn't surprise me that they could sell it for less. And we do lose when companies stop taking risks in innovating new products for fear of the copycats.
If the Chinese company can easily clone a product and still deliver something bellow their competitor's product price I'd say the R&D costs for the original company were overblown. The Japanese company should have recouped their additional costs between the product launch and the Chinese company's product launch. If that interval was too short for them to do so it means that, as I said before, their "costs to create…
> For society's greater good we should put no premium on "I was here first/I did it first!", but only on "I build this product using less resources, hence it has the lowest price!".
I disagree completely.
If we didn't care about being there first we wouldn't have patents, and without patents, why would companies bother spending any money on R&D?
If you spend money on R&D, you have to recuperate those costs. If a competitor could just make an exact copy, then even if they made it in the same exact way that you did, they'd be able to sell it at a lower cost because they spent nothing on R&D.
Patents aren't perfect, but they exist for a good reason: to promote innovation for "society's greater good"
Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't know if he actually said that but isn't all innovation incremental? He said exactly that: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/tech/2014/10/jony-ive-lessons... And yes innovation is incremental but this is Xiaomi not simply borrowing design cues but literally cloning a design. See for yourself - here's their take on Japanese company Balmuda's air purifier: https://www.balmuda.com/jp/airengine/ Xiaomi's version: h…
Other than the white color, they actually look different to me. That said, I can show you two editors which look completely alike. I hope you feel the same about them. Imagine if I said: Atom is such a rip off and the sublime guy must be feeling that GitHub is lazy and a thief. I wonder if GitHub compensated the sublime author who is a small indie dev! http://cache.filehippo.com/img/ex/2794__Sublime_text_2_1.png http…
> Imagine if I said: Atom is such a rip off and the sublime guy must be feeling that GitHub is lazy and a thief.
Edit: my original comment wasn't very constructive.
My issue with the analogy is that Xiaomi openly copies the design of competing products that have gained success, at least in part, due to having differentiated designs. Usually they copy without providing even incremental innovation or product differentiation.
In the case of Sublime Text vs. Atom, GitHub developed an editor with a fundamentally different underlying architecture. Github also made Atom open source, which addressed one of the main complaints against Sublime Text. Atom offered obvious and non-trivial product differentiation.
Also, Xiaomi specifically targets products that have distinctive designs. Sublime Text's design doesn't look that distinctive. What are the components of the design (excluding configurable parameters like a light/dark theme) that Atom copied? The main similarity I see are the tabs, but neither look distinct from most other tabs (i.e., Chrome browser tabs).
Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't get that something proprietary was stolen and the creators are upset? From a software perspective you can't imagine how you'd feel if a critical piece of your business software was reversed engineered and copied by a competitor? An example might be finance and low latency trading. Or an ML / AI breakthrough. Or anything on the fringe still providing a competitive advantage and not a solved problem on Github…
> From a software perspective you can't imagine how you'd feel if a critical piece of your business software was reversed engineered and copied by a competitor? Definitely, could definitely understand if it was about money/business. But that is never mentioned when designers get angry about their designs being stolen. I think it's not about money/business. I think it's a different mindset where a "stolen" design deva…
It could be that I came from the creative world, but when I develop a cool feature and someone copies it and they don't attribute what they are doing to me, I feel devalued. It makes me quite mad. And that's what is happening here. Apple painted the Mona Lisa and now some upstart is selling prints of it for cheap and not giving credit.
Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's not act like Apple has not been known to steal ideas and package them with the Apple logo. It's just part of business.
Usually they've caved in to the conventions of the market (iOS notifications) or missing features (F.lux). The amount of blatant theft seems minimal. They usually put their own spin on things to differentiate somehow. Even Microsoft has gone its own way with Windows after some heavy overlap with MacOS and other windowing systems (DESQview in partcular). Windows 3.1 was more different, and Windows 95 borrowed more hea…
> The amount of blatant theft seems minimal
This is pure conjecture, but every company does it. My point was let's not act like Apple is innocent and does not.
Re: Xiaomi’s first laptop is a Macbook Air rival
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if that said someone copies your work you spent all your weekends working on and starts making a lot of money on it?
Then he/she clearly did something better than you. Had the insight that you lack.
So you think it's ok to sit around wait for someone else to do all the hard work and then just copy what they did?