HP's New Logo Is the Awesome One It Never Used (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, HP announced the Spectre 13, the world's thinnest laptop. One of the subtle changes HP is making with its recent global brand offensive is to its logo. HP has decided to go with a minimalist design consisting of four slashes making up the "HP" brand name. Previously, "Hewlett-Packard" was written out in full on last year's Spectre x360. HP says it will be using the minimalist logo solely on its premium laptops. Even though the logo has received a makeover, it's not exactly new. This very same mark first surfaced online in a 2011 brand redesign study released by Moving Brands, who HP had hired to develop a new logo and brand identity.

Comments

Ew

[binarylarry]

HP laptops? nasty

Re:Ew

[TheGratefulNet]

lock down that wifi slot! can't have people installing any old compliant and functional pci-e card. gotta make them buy OURS. we'll whitelist only ours, bwahahaha!

evil fucking company. then again, anyone that large is also evil; comes with the territory, it seems ;(

Re:Ew

[KGIII]

Compared to these laptops, mine isn't very thin and it doesn't really look all that fancy - which is a bonus. It's a bit heavy but lighter than it looks like - even with two drives in it. I'm pretty happy with it but it's a "mobile workstation" and not a "laptop." I bought the Titan X4K earlier this year and have been pretty happy with the product. I imagine it's more than what most folks want to pay (I decked it out, including the extras - sans OS, of course) but I think it's worth it.

I am not affiliated. I'm just really happy with it. The price isn't even really all that bad when you consider what you're getting. You don't have to go all out, there are less expensive options.

But, this is the third or fourth one from this company now and I'm pretty sure that I'm never going to buy a laptop from one of the bigger companies ever again. The savings aren't much and I really don't mind spending the extra. The money seems to stay a little closer to home this way. You might be on to something about evil coming with size. But, if it's going to be for myself then I'm probably never going to buy a major brand laptop again. I haven't bought a branded desktop in a long time. I just get white-boxes that are interesting on NewEgg. I then put what I want in 'em though I don't do whole builds any more - I'm too old for that shit. ;-)

Well, too lazy/busy.

Re:Ew

[Neo-Rio-101]

Recent issue:

Friend had a cheap HP desktop. Wanted to upgrade it to 8GB as according to the website, it was specced for that.
Goes to buy compatible RAM as listed on the website.
RAM doesn't work. PC won't boot.
Goes to shop to try all different kinds of RAM, and none of their RAM worked. PC still won't boot.

Calls HP and asks about the RAM.
Told he needs "HP" RAM and HP offers to sell it to him for over $200

Re:Ew

[hcs_$reboot]

It's not really a minor consideration. It's the fundamental way HP does business - everything from HP only memory to HP only boards to HP only drives.

Shit, shit and shit.

isn't this the way Apple is functioning?

Re: Ew

[tlhIngan]

Try upgrading an SSD on the early 2015 macbook pro... No third parties have made one compatible yet.

Well, that's just a supply issue - NVMe/PCIe SSDs aren't a terribly big part of the market right now either. I mean, you can buy a PCIe SSD for your PC and chances are it won't boot from it. So things are still in flux for NVMe/PCIe SSDs. Apple of course, controls the entire chain so they can make their OS boot from PCIe/NVMe easily enough, and the performance is easily triple that of SATA3 (1.5GB/sec vs SATA's 540MB/sec), which is why Apple went with it.

Of course, as one of the few computers on the market supporting NVMe/PCIe, there just isn't a big enough market for most providers to bother. Even M2 SSDs aren't as easy to find, ignoring the fact that M2 allows for it to be on either the SATA (slower) or PCIe (faster) busses.

So it's hard to find a third party replacement because most third parties aren't making them. Those that do charge more.

100% compatible with common standards

Not quite. OS X refuses to enable TRIM on a non-Apple SSD and you need 3rd-party software to make it work.

It can be manually enabled in the newer versions. Which is not a sane default, especially when there is no easy way to notice.

Well, the user could easily stick in an SSD with a buggy TRIM implementation, so if the OS enabled it, it would corrupt itself and the user's files.

Apple enables it automatically on their SSDs because they verify that TRIM works on their hardware. Since there are tons of other SSDs out there, Apple couldn't test them all and the disable TRIM because it's the safest option that will protect the user's data.

El Capitan added the ability to enable it natively in the OS but with big caveats that there could be data loss, so it displays a nice warning.

Samsung drives are fine, but there are dozens of others not as reliable.

An ad

[kamapuaa]

I don't get it. Is this sponsored content?

Hate to say it but I think I agree with all the crazy anti-Windows people that pollute this site. No use getting an expensive windows computer that can't play games. Windows is only if you're making a game machine or want to buy one of the $200 laptops.

HP Logo Police chief must have retired.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I used to work for a software company that was an OEM vendor to HP. The Logo police declared on the top left corner of the window, we should have the logo. So we created it that way. Then we created a cool animation that will "spin" the logo, as though it has been etched on a glass plate spinning on a vertical axis. It would spin if you click on that corner. A small inconsequential easter egg.

No! The logo police came down on it like a ton of bricks. The aspect ratio of the log does not match the company spec during the animation. They made us pull the release candidate and rebuild the whole software.

We had the last laugh though, we spun off the OEM software under our own brand, and HP competed with us, then spun off its software division as Agilent, and then we beat Agilent in that business. They eventually sold their customer base who used the competing version created by them to us and exited the business. Anyone who spent that much time enforcing logo display deserved to go out of business.

Re:HP Logo Police chief must have retired.

[Xabraxas]

Every large company has branding standards and most are very strict about how they are used. This is not limited to HP.

Re:HP Logo Police chief must have retired.

[thegarbz]

Anyone who spent that much time enforcing logo display deserved to go out of business.

You have just described the entire fortune 500 portfolio. When companies get to the point where their logo is valuable or their products are worth forging there are good reasons to enforce incredibly strict logo rules. This can be to:
a) show consistency
b) drive a certain message (i.e. our branding standards include which colours can cover which part of a page and a based on psychological studies of how people react to colours).
c) ensure that the brand is advertised in a consistent way; which ties into:
d) fight forging, when you're always 100% sure of exactly how a product is supposed to look it makes it easier to spot the fakes, especially since the fakes often make minor modifications to the logo to avoid falling afoul of trademark laws which are about the only laws that apply properly in much of the world.

I once had to redesign a product because the printing proof showed a single colour of the logo slightly differently due to a supplier changing printers. And when I say slightly differently it was resolved by increasing the yellow colour by 2 values (out of 256). I couldn't tell the difference side by side between the printed copies but the brand team could.

Re:HP Logo Police chief must have retired.

[houghi]

Logo and branding are VERY specific and related closer to trademark then to copyright. There are always forms and papers on how the logo should look, what colors must be used, what if it is in black and white and a lot of other things.

It is like using different glasses for different beers. This is NOT to have a different taste, this is so people see what beer you are drinking.

e.g. Stella Artois is just an average beer and in Belgium they compete with themselves (Jupiler). So what did they do to make Stella a premium beer? They changed the glass. Not the beer, the way the glass looked.

So perhaps they deserve to go out of business in your opinion, but most ikely they wont (for that reason) because they understand how important branding is and apparently you don't.

Re:How much?

[supremebob]

It seems like HP got a new social media PR department to go with this new logo. I saw this story several times on Facebook, Engadget, and Reddit as well.

But, seriously, it's just a weird logo on a laptop that's too thin to be practical. Big deal. I don't want to carry around damn dongle to use an Ethernet or HDMI port!

Fails the "stuff that matters" test

[AmazingRuss]

A logo change for a company nobody cares about anymore is like don't care squared.

I hope they paid well.

Re:Fails the "stuff that matters" test

[Bite The Pillow]

That logo is awesomesauceballs. Minimalist as all hell, but recognizable like yo mommas back.

But it is as newsworthy as the ass I just dropped.

I liked the link to hpes logo, which is boring like picking your crack and not finding any Klingons. The (tit)tees are crammed together for the first time in history! Epicleventy!!!

Wait, CEOs spend time on this shit instead of making a business that doesn't nurse butt. There's your news, and stock tip.

The bird

[jdavidb]

If I look at it upside down it looks sort of like it is flipping me off...

im sure the marketing team woke up for it.

[nimbius]

upbeat marketing droneSo, Fiorina dropped out of the race without a snowballs chance in hell, I got great parking this morning, and we just invented a laptop thinner than the christgods at apple....
PHB: hey we need to logo the new brochures for third quarter what should we-
upbeat marketing drone: the one that kicks more ass than Popeye on bath salts.
PHB Ok steve we'll use...the lines...but honestly i swear to god no more coffee for you.

Re:How much?

[sunami88]

It seems like HP got a new social media PR department to go with this new logo. I saw this story several times on Facebook, Engadget, and Reddit as well.

Title:
Advertising HP Businesses News Hardware Technology HP's New Logo Is the Awesome One It Never Used

So I went to Wikipedia...
Hewlett-Packard, Founded January 1, 1939; 77 years ago

I'm not going to start screaming "OOOOH SLASHVERTISEMENT" because the story really has made the rounds everywhere, it's just a little disingenuous to suggest that the logo from a design contest in 2011 is the logo they "Never Used". Definitely some kind of PR spin.

That's HP? Probably wouldn't have guessed

[darthsilun]

I can see it, but only because I knew what was coming.

If I hadn't known, I'd probably still be wondering.

Epic fail IMO.

Ugly as shit

[nctritech]

That's all: this logo is ugly as shit. It doesn't even look like HP. It looks like a part of a postal bar code got stepped on. This minimalism thing is getting really out of hand.

Re:How much?

[whipslash]

It costs: the time it takes for a user to post, and the time it takes to get voted up in the firehose. Don't like it? Be more active in the firehose.

Re:How much?

[TheGratefulNet]

bored overpaid execs who just don't earn their keep anymore - THEY are the ones always who want to change a perfectly good company logo.

sgi had a great logo. the idiots changed it. hp had a very long-running and classic logo. they changed it several times.

I was at DEC and for some odd reason, they kept their nice, working logo for, well, the entire company history! apple has kept theirs mostly the same, too, over their history.

seems some companies hire marketing people who just don't offer anything of real value, they try to justify their jobs and do 'something' but usually they just create crap.

I understand that when a restaurant has a food poisoning and goes out of business (just a name change, really) to refresh itself, I get why that is done. but with hp? ok, the more I think about it, the more I guess I just answered my own question.

Re:Give me a break

[suupaabaka]

Honestly, I think the whole point of Slashdot is to incite discussion. You get a lot of interesting insights from discussion topics that are only tangentially related to the opening post. As a nerd who cares about stuff that matters, I'm personally not averse to articles like this appearing in the feed because half the time, there are cool little tidbits from readers buried in the comments.

Turd, meet gold paint

[Iamthecheese]

I've seen several stories obviously pushed by one social media organization or another not quite make it to the front page. I think out new overlords are just a little less savvy about preventing manipulation.

Re:Thumbs up

[default luser]

That's a great logo, sort of like the Paul Rand IBM logo brought up to date.

Of course, great logo != great company. But it beats having a boring or shitty logo.

Are you high? The Rand 1972 IBM logo has 8 lines of resolution FOR EACH LETTER. You can clearly make the details out.

This stupid HP logo has TWO lines of resolution for each letter. That's no-longer distinctive, it's just overly clever bullshit that will piss-off your average idiot user.

Note that your average idiot user also includes every PHB who fills out the IT order sheets. A pretentious logo like this will be an automatic turnoff and result in cancellation of the order.

Re:Upside-Down

[6Yankee]

I have an HP laptop for work, and the easiest way to tell it's the right way around when I put it on the docking station is that it says "dy" in the middle instead of "hp".

Re:Ugliest Logo I've ever seen.

[lfourrier]

just look att the logo of lip :
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lip

Re: How much?

[Maritz]

Yeah. This is an article about a LOGO on a fucking laptop. Unreal.

What was wrong with the other one?

[Mr_Silver]

I'm no brand or design guru (like most people here on Slashdot) but I did rather like the other logo they had on the HP Spectre 13.

Wonder why they didn't go with that one?

Re:How much?

[whipslash]

There is actually a lot of automated filtering going already. It's a fine line between blocking legitimate posts and making sure we can filter spam. The more users interact withe firehose, the better the content on Slashdot will be.