Obviously people rip off Apple. It is not news. It’s been going on forever. It didn’t just coincide with the Apple vs. Samsung trial, as Gruber and Marco seem to want to believe. We don’t need to mention it in every article, nor will we. Nor is there a rule that we must. This industry is full of theft, both large and small. I could tell you that Apple lifted its laptop keyboard designs from Sony, and its iOS notifications from Android and… aw, but you don’t want to go down that path. Do you? And you certainly don’t need me to mention it every time I cover their products, right?
Agreed with the spirit of Josh Topolsky’s post, and I’m open to the fact that The Verge will mention these things in the forthcoming product reviews, but he closes with a really weak argument. When the products obviously look ridiculously similar (and not just on a feature level but on a “the whole damn thing looks identical” level), I’d have to say that journalistic integrity demands that you do mention it. Trying to conflate big and small thefts so that you just don’t mention the glaringly obvious facts about why a product exists (to piggyback on Apple’s design and aesthetic) just seems sneaky.
So please don’t mention how Apple stole iOS notifications every time you cover an Apple product. Please do mention when it looks, to anyone ever, that another company steals a whole entire product and sells it as their own. When you fail to do that, it really does seem as though you’re more worried about “being fair” to organizations who don’t deserve it than you are interested in being truthful.
Reblogged from joshuatopolsky|257 notes |#