I Doubt Apple Will Sue

This picture respectfully taken from the Tulip Ego site. I hope they appreciate the free advertising.

I was reading coolest-gadgets.com this evening when I saw a picture of the notebook pictured above. As an owner of a 266 mhz G3 tangerine iBook (pictured below with a blue one), the first thing I thought was that somehow Apple had revised this design and issued a new computer. Of course, they recently released MacBooks and I know they do not resemble the old models. It's not like Apple to recycle old designs so flagrantly anyway. It's even less likely for them to recycle a design which was often likened to a toilet seat in design and which was criticized for adding too much bulk and weight to the computer because of the added material.


The fact that the iBook design wasn't universally lauded makes it all the more curious that an expensive vanity computer like the Tulip Ego would ape it's design. The Tulip Ego was designed by Laurent de Beer but I can't imagine he lives in a sufficient vacuum to have missed Apple's iBooks. The computer comes in different possible external designs (using "shells") and can include 470 diamonds and cost over $300,000. It's essentially a vanity computer which could make it a kissing cousin of a Mac depending on your opinions of Mac users. ;-)

While Apple has been known to sue companies for attempting weak rip-offs of their popular models as they have done in the past with the original gumdrop, color iMacs and the Mac Mini, I don't think they're likely to sue over someone using a design similar to such an old model.

The funny thing about this computer's information page is that I was unable to find information anywhere that tells me what OS it runs. While I'm pretty sure it runs Windows, I find it particularly amusing that the company found this information sufficiently inconsequential as not to mention it on any of its main pages.