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Black Is The New Beige
An anonymous submitter writes: "Spurred by Apple's innovations and the dangers of commoditization, computer makers are finally moving beyond beige. Rather than exploring diverse ideas, however, they have made a decision reminiscent of the fashionistas: black is the new beige (a NYTimes story)."
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
someone had to say it : Steve Jobs pushed black design for NeXT cubes, and Apple had a black Performa 6200 series along time ago.
Although I consider black to be an advantage over beige since you don't see coffe or cola stains that much, I really doubt that a new color will boost PC sales all that much. If there's one thing that Apple does right, it's 'everything' : just changing colors won't do. The iMac was (and is again) a new formfactor, a new system, new bus (USB/firewire) new drives (slot loading iMacs)
And anywhow, nothing beats a TiBook...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Will we ever see easy to change CD-Rom drive front covers to match your beige/black computer?
If anything the clash of drive covers with anything other than the "standard" colors has made the move to a rainbow of colors.
Perhaps a non-mono-color design would help, with black as the base color in order to more easily match drives, but with other colors accenting the machine to keep it from being the same dull design as the beige boxes?
Well, at first when i saw that people were starting to bring out Black cases I thought it was neat that there was variety. Now though if thats just going to be the new standard.. it kinda sucks.. Really I mean black.. you can't paint on that. One of the greatest things about beige is that its a perfect primer color. So maybe you're not artistic (like me), beige makes a great background for many a cool sticker. I personally have everything from rock bands to the infimous Dogbert "Out Out You demon's of stupidity" plastered on the side of my case (which by the way I know I wasn't the only one to invent the idea of making that into a sticker .. but I did come up with it on my own a few years ago.. literally like two minutes after I saw the comic).
Anyway.. don't know exactly how black would fit into the whole sticker scheme.. probably wouldn't look right to me at least.
Well who knows maybe in a few years the computer companies will steal the idea of the phone companies and start making designer shells for the PC with all kinds of pictures and all you gotta do is snap it on the side of the box.
Who makes you Sig?
Back when I first started using computers in the early 80's, my middle school had some Apple ][+'s. But one of them was made by another company (I think it was HP?) It was black. (We always just called it the "black apple".)
It had other cool stuff too, mainly it had an extra module covering the back, which had a volume knob on it among other things; the standard apple ][+'s had no volume knob. I always liked the black apple better than the beige apples.
Also, if anybody knows of any cool rackmount gadgets (either semiuseful, like a serial LCD scroller, or downward pointing lightbar to illuminate controls) or useless (blinkenlights), or cheap blank plates to dremel and insert your own stuff, that'd be cool too.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
What I want to know is... What the hell happened all of the desktop cases? It's getting hard to find a good looking case that is made to sit on it's side. I would like to include a pc as part of my home audio equipment, but I don't want to shell out a metric shitload of money for a decent case. This is probably the best looking one I have found so far, but the cheapest I can find it for is $225. I know I could just use a standard rack mounted case, but I wan't something that will match my other components.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
I remember working on a teal blue Indy & purple Indigo2 at my old job in the mid-nineties. But sgi always did colored workstation cases way back in the 80's (check out the brown & red Iris Crimson & the Blue Indigo1). People used to always comment on how unique(they either loved 'em or laughed at 'em) our computers were. We were all designers, so aesthetics of the boxes were important to us. That's why we picked sgi---they had the coolest looking ones.
Eventually everything'll be in a closet somewhere and you'll be wanting to get a new pair of wireless VR glasses..."I really like those new RayBans, the ones with the widescreen option. Do they come in tortise-shell?"
When George Fisher, the outgoing president of Motorola went to Kodak to help lead their "digital revolution," he was asked by the press what lesson he was taking. He said roughly, "For a technologist it was humbling to realize that you could triple the sales of a pager just by offering it colors other than black."
Unfortunately, the US Military disagrees:
So, while black may be the cool new color for computers, it's long since passe for pagers and cell phones, and in fact has become military-conservative.
3Dcool makes some really cool looking modded cases using automotive paint but they're out of my price range :(.
I wish PC designers (as well as all consumer electronics designers) would experiment a little more with their designs.
It used to be all large TVs were in a wood cabinet. They were generally beautiful. Then sometime in the late 80s there were all sort of experiments in design, and it took several years for the winner to emerge; today's black molded plastic standard that pretty much all of our TVs are.
Around that same time, component stereo equipment switched from silver with the occasional wooden accents to the now standard black.
And that seems to be the lifespan of consumer electronics design. Functional-experiment-functional-stylish-functual black. Every so often somebody will break from the heard, but will eventually come back to the standards.
The Internet is generally stupid