Make Your Own iMac!

Today I sent an email to Future Power in protest over their new iMac knock-off, the EPower. I'm including the body of the email in this article, and if permitted will update this article with any response I get from Epower regarding my letter.

With regard to the industrial design of the EPower PC:

Future Power's decision to market a machine that fails to innovate any significant design features beyond that introduced by the Apple iMac is absolutely reprehensible. Instead of making any attempt to revolutionise the PC world with fresh ideas, Future Power has chosen to trade on the hard work and investments of others. This action is no more than petty theft, an attempt to steal market share, not by the honourable method of making a better product, but by choosing to ride on the coattails of another company's success. The blatant copy of the iMac industrial design is not just an attempt to look like a highly successful, innovative computer, but an active attempt to fool customers into thinking that they are buying a machine made by another company, who has invested serious money and time on marketing that product.

To all the people at Future Power who did not protest this move, you should be ashamed. It shows a lack of confidence in your ability to produce a computer worth marketing in it's own right. It also shows that you have forsaken any sense of ethics and decency in the business world. You are deserving of the lawsuit that Apple is bringing against you.

Kelsey Brookes
The Computer Graphics College
Sydney, Australia

This is not just a case of creating a machine to trade on the look of the iMac. We all like beautiful things, and wish to be surrounded by them. If it was just a case of the EPower attempting to catch some of the spirit of innovation that the iMac represents, then I would probably applaud, but their design has more serious overtones of malicious intent.

By choosing to copy the industrial design of the iMac so closely, they are not just trying to create a beautiful product, but to seriously infringe on the intellectual and business property of another company. It's not just copying the look. Or rather, copying the look means a bit more in a product like the iMac--- indeed any product which has an easily identifiable market presence.

There's no denying that the iMac has been one of the most wildly successful computers in history. Even more so, it's probably the most easily recognized computer in history--- I doubt that even the original Mac would be as easily recognisable to the average Joe on the street as the Teal Terror.

It's also a source of wonder in the Mac community for more than just its winning good looks --- It's the first Mac in forever to actually have an advertising campaign. We even saw it in Australia, and that's nothing short of stunning. The last ad I saw for Apple in Australia was by a reseller who came up with the original idea of overdoing the "mouse" metaphor and dragging an Apple mouse through the streets of Sydney, camera at road-height and squeaking. You could feel the Mac users cringing all over Sydney.

Apple's Award Winning iMac		Future Power's Mildly Ugly Knock-Off

But all that has changed. The Mac now seems to have a wide-spread campaign happening not just in the States, but all over the world. Anyone driving, or bussing, their way from the CBD of Sydney to the western suburbs (and there's a lot of them!) can't miss the 50-foot hight 5 colour iMac "Yum!" billboard. Our bus-shelters and train stations have every print ad Apple is running right now. It's an amazing time to be a Mac user.

And this is what the EPower is trading off. Every one of those ads becomes a free marketing campaign for this knock-off machine. To sell this computer, they just need to get it in the stores. Every one of those computers sold could have been an iMac. This design is not just attempting to capture a spirit of creative computing to benefit sales industry-wide, but stealing the sales from under the nose of the company who did the work to bring the industry to this point.

Apple took a lot of heat on the iMac. No floppy, no connections for legacy hardware. USB not fully supported, they were lucky to get off as lightly as they did on these issues. USB had been around for years, almost completely unused, until the iMac made it an overnight sensation. Not to mention the fact that because of the unique flavour of the iMac, all this comes in an array of funky colours and shapes that the Wintel world would never have been brave enough to try. Apple again pushed the industry into widespread acceptance of a new order. If they hadn't, we'd all be dealing with legacy hardware in beige for the next ten years, and for that I'm grateful, even if there were some initial painful moments.

If it had been up to Future Power ("Oh we have a floppy, we can't be sued") and their idea of innovation, we'd have no more than the same old gear available before the iMac.

And that's the point. It's not just about sales, or copying industrial design, or even about marketing.

It's about justice.

Apple put themselves on the line for this machine, in more ways than one, and they deserve to be able to say; "This is Ours", without having to defend themselves from dodgy cut-price con artists. I'm saying innovate, not copy. If you want to ride the new wave of computer design, make it a machine worthy of being copied itself, a machine that will make people wish that they'd thought of that.

And my take on Future Power and it's impending legal hassles?

I think we're about to see another company being "beleaguered" for a while.

__________

Kelsey Brookes works at the Computer Graphics College as a lecturer in sound and introductory computing for the net. He is also a trained opera singer, writes contempory music and performs as a singer and keyboard player in a cover band called Drill. Kelsey is 24, lives in Sydney, Australia and has moved far too many times to be considered even remotely grounded in the real world.

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February 09, 2010