The stupid controversy about the design of the Apple’s products

And why all of us must copy the best of others

Alex R Chies
Across the mirror
Published in
3 min readApr 23, 2014

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It’s a constant in the last years read a lot of posts and articles criticizing the industrial design in the products of Apple. However, at the same time, the most of the people are agree in these same products have an incredible good design.

The main attack against the Apple’s design team is the similar appearance between their products and much of the products designed for the Dieter Rams team for Braun. And I wondered why?

All designers in the world are agree in with the 10 principles of good design created by Dieter Rams, all designers in the world praise the concept, design lines and extraordinary simplicity in the Braun products. Then, what’s the problem in take the best things of a good work and adapt them to your own products? All of us do it. And that’s good!

It’s an incredible hypocrisy the ruthless criticism the Apple’s designers must read every day. They are doing a really good job that all companies must copy. Is it not true that the most of the laptops have a terrific design? Is it not true that the Macbooks are almost the only laptops people buy due to their design and not the specifications? It is one of the few victories for the designers in the tech industry where engineers and businessmen create an horrible set of products based in price and specifications that almost never deliver what they promise.

When we are designing anything, we always use those things our previous experience tell us that work. Using the experience of other designers in other products (similar or not) is not copy, is intelligence, group intelligence.

The designers live in a world where plagiarism and copyright are still words too huge. There is a notable difference among plagiarism and share knowledge. With their attitude, designers defend the policy about stupid patent privileges although, of course, themselves deny it categorically.

Programmers share constantly their knowledge, algorithms, methods and techniques. They create libraries to others can use their processes. What is different in design? I tell you, the ego.

Obviously, I’m not defending the copy/paste any “designers” use to present a “new design”. I think all of us have the enough sincerity to make out between these cases.

It’s an evidence the design team of Apple take great ideas of the Rams’ designs. But it’s also an evidence that they spend a lot of time in use these “copies” correctly. We know that it requires also a huge job and much companies try to do it without success.

I think designers should detach our ego, share our ideas, successes and fails and work to improve every day a bit more the world we have around us. We should take from others their successes, adapt them to our designs and work to solve the fails and errors. Why we should work in a bad solution for a problem if other designer has solved it brilliantly? It has no sense.

The Apple design team works with intelligence. They take the good things of others, adapt them to their products, spend the time their saves in polishing and improves all the more of their work and present brilliant products that users love. Is it not the work of a designer? What are you doing then?

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Alex R Chies
Across the mirror

Product Designer, UI Architect and Scrum Master at @stratiobd, passionate for standards and accessibility. Follow me as @alexrchies