Envy: The Apple of HP's Eye

In design, imitation is a funny thing. When Thing A looks like Thing B, it can be homage─or plagiarism. Tribute─or theft. The message from the imitator to the imitated might be, "Yep, you nailed it, the platonic ideal of this category, and I can't help but follow your lead"─or a more brazen "You did all the hard work of creation, and now I will shamelessly copy."

But a lot of that is just academic banter for the design teams that work at Thing A and Thing B's companies. The real question is whether you, the consumer, care. The laptop HP announced today, the appropriately named Envy, is as brazen a case of design thievery as it gets, aping the look and feel of Apple's MacBook in every conceivable way. If I worked at HP, I would be ashamed to walk in the door today. But if I were buying a Windows computer, I'd snap an Envy laptop right up.

A laundry list of the, uh, homages that the Envy pays the MacBook is beside the point. (Here's one anyway, though: brushed metal enclosure with tapered edges; sunken black chiclet-style keyboard; glossy, glassy, black-framed screen; buttonless, gesture-based trackpad.) It's the gestalt, the way everything fits together; when you see the HP Envy, it's impossible to think anything besides, "That's as elegant a machine as the MacBook Pro. Heck, that is the MacBook Pro." It seemed clear to me, looking at the Envy last week, that HP wasn't out to duplicate this, this, and this from the MacBook, but rather make a PC version of the entire thing. This image, from Gizmodo, gives the effect.

For PC users, that's great news. The Envy is the first Windows PC that I, a certified Mac guy, would consider buying for personal use. HP has even out Apple'd Apple in the ports category─the 13-inch Envy has only USB, HDMI, and headphone jacks (the 15-inch model adds Ethernet)─a coup for any PC designer. It lacks a DVD drive, too. It's clear that HP is getting assertive about what users actually need, not just piling questionable feature after questionable feature into a machine until it's a thick, heavy, unwieldy eyesore. It's farsighted, confident design. And that's the biggest─and most welcome─thing HP took from Apple.