According to leaked images, the $46 billion dollar Chinese phone manufacturer Xiaomi may be stepping up its game about copying Apple designs. A particular photo emerged, featuring what seems to be, without question, a Macbook Air, with the Apple logo replaced by an orange “MI” symbol.
Joni Ive has taken a personal stance towards Xiaomi’s products, describing the similarity to Apple products as plain and simple theft:
”When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work, you spend 7 or 8 years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy.”.
After putting each product side by side, and witnessing the more than obvious similarities, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s global vice president, has described Apple’s accusations as “sensationalist”, trying to make a case that when two designers with equal talent work on similar products they may reach the same conclusion.
While we entertain ourselves wondering about two identical twins, separated at birth, ended up in two different continents, growing up to design consumer electronics, and ending up in a legal dispute on who designed the iPhone 6, let’s contemplate the following photo, taken on stage at a Xiaomi event:
The laptop, whose production Xiaomi is now reportedly denying, is within a whole new level of copyright infringement, which previously involved the iPhone, Apple TV and Apple Magic Trackpad, among an increasing number of devices. Rumors have spread about its operating system to be a modified version of Linux, set to resemble OS X, at least to a degree, which is something Apple will not take lightly.