Remember in 2006 Nokia, Motorola, RIM and others made literally everything but rectangular phones. They were covered in buttons and other crap.

Ive's vision of a virtually button free phone was strikingly different at the time, a device even simpler than the Star Trek communicator pad.

>Anyway, what's the fucking difference if you steal a few pieces here and there or the whole thing? Nothing.

It's very hard to strip something down to the essential components and integrate those into a package that becomes obvious in retrospect. The steering wheel in a car, the magnetic seal on a refrigerator door, these are all obvious now but at the time were huge breakthroughs.

If you can't see the difference between copying and working to reduce something down to the fundamentals you're obviously unaware of how one is lazy and the other is crazy hard.

This quote is meant to make you think about the differences between stealing and copying ideas. It isn't literal. It doesn't even make sense literally. Stealing means you make it yours. It is no longer theirs. How do you do that with an idea? You make it so much better that people forget about the previous idea you took.

Edit: my original comment wasn't very constructive.

My issue with the analogy is that Xiaomi openly copies the design of competing products that have gained success, at least in part, due to having differentiated designs. Usually they copy without providing even incremental innovation or product differentiation.

In the case of Sublime Text vs. Atom, GitHub developed an editor with a fundamentally different underlying architecture. Github also made Atom open source, which addressed one of the main complaints against Sublime Text. Atom offered obvious and non-trivial product differentiation.

Also, Xiaomi specifically targets products that have distinctive designs. Sublime Text's design doesn't look that distinctive. What are the components of the design (excluding configurable parameters like a light/dark theme) that Atom copied? The main similarity I see are the tabs, but neither look distinct from most other tabs (i.e., Chrome browser tabs).