I'm sad because there are a lot of great design solutions waiting to be discovered. I think a company the size of HP (and especially with their roots) should be able to provide the market novel and world-class design. The problem is that they don't want to take the risk anymore--they'd rather copy market-proven concepts. The modern film industry is in a very similar and sad spot.
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This is romanticising the film industry; it has not changed much in the past few decades. People remember one or two films a year out of THOUSANDS. It's always been that way; there are a few gems in a sea of the same old shit.
Thousands overall maybe, but the number of mass market films is in the hundreds.
I, personally, have a familiar definition of "mass market film". I grew up in a small town with about nine total screens, usually one movie per screen and one screen per movie. Figure they turn over 4 screens per week for new releases. That's 208 movies per year. You'd need 3-4 more doublings to get it over 1000, so it's pretty clear that "hundreds" is the better order of magnitude.
I picked a year at random: 2008. The following movies were all released in 2008: The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, In Bruges, Kung Fu Panda, Gran Torino, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and Quantum of Solace. Your average moviegoer will easily remember more than "one or two" of those (though not necessarily the same ones).
So the proportion goes from two in a thousand to maybe five in 250, or from 1 in 500 to 1 in 50.
I agree that this may be a decades-old problem. But it's not just that there are that many bad scripts and movies by the numbers. It's this sad reality: creating sequel 4 of a known series is a much safer financial bet than greenlighting something original. That was my analogy here.
Is this a 'good artists copy, great artists steal' example? I get the sense they're underestimating the modern consumer. Even though the shape and color have been duplicated, the slightly educated consumer will likely notice the cheap plastics and same crappy OS that made up the beige boxes.
I wish HP saw your comment.