Larger, more established manufacturers-- unlike LUXPRO-- are usually smart enough (or have enough lawyers on retainer) to know that cloning another company's entire product design is a big no-no. Look at Dell. Well, maybe not right at it, since that'd probably be sort of nauseating. But look just a little to the left of Dell, and you'll see the sort of copycatting that doesn't attract a raft of lawsuits; instead of making an iPod knock-off that looked exactly like Apple's player, it created the Dell Digital Jukebox-- a device that was roughly the same shape, size, and color as an iPod (and therefore hinted at it enough to call forth the association in the minds of customers), but was so irretrievably ugly and cheap-looking that no one could ever possibly mistake it for an Apple-branded product. See how that works?

So we can't say we're surprised that Hewlett-Packard has "borrowed" one aspect of Apple's industrial design in the latest revision to some of its consumer offerings. According to CNET, the latest Pavilion PCs boast a "silver-and-white design" strongly reminiscent of Apple's pervasive product color schemes. HP admits the similarity, but insists it's just a coincidence: "We got a very warm reception for this. We didn't do it because Apple did it. We did it because our customers told us that they liked it." Well, yeah-- except that customers probably like it because it reminds them of their various iPods.

And it would be futile for HP to deny that it was trying, in part, to match the very co-branded iPods that it sells to its customers, right? After all, The Inquirer reports that HP's new Media Center m7000 systems will be the first computers "with a built-in docking spot for an iPod," a situation the site plays up as some sort of anathema to Mac users-- "the religious equivalent of a Roman Catholic Church service taking place in a Taliban mosque." Well, maybe that would be true... if the dock were indeed fully integrated and built into the top of the new HPs. But HP's "built-in dock" is just the standard Apple standalone dock with a "molded piece of plastic" that fits around it as it "sits on top of the PC." For some reason we aren't exactly apoplectic with seething envy over here.

Anyway, even if you charitably believe that HP's new white-and-silver look isn't directly cribbed from Apple's tried-and-true design palette, it's nice to hear that HP's own market research shows that Apple chose a color scheme for its products that tests well among consumers today. Then again, we can't imagine there isn't at least a little causality at play, here; after all, Apple's been doing the white-and-silver thing for, what, well over three years now, right? So maybe that's why so many consumers told HP that they liked it. In any case, we can at least give HP props for not going the LUXPRO route and introducing an "iPavilion G5" or something. At least, not yet.