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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)."
If you're looking to go beyond the boring black and/or beige, here are a few nice case sources:
www.lovermecases.com
www.colorcases.com
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
And in the future, all RAM is going to come in a hypointelligent shade of the colour purple to complement the neon-red motherboard, the puke green power supply and the XP-ugly os on most computers. Now aren't you glad you didn't get a clear box?
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
That's okay, for a while White was the new Beige. Briefly, it looked like Purple might be the new Beige, and if you consult my young daughter, green-bug-shaped is her idea of the new Beige. No doubt barbie-Pink will be the new Beige for some subset of computing.
And, in about six months, there will be a retro trend, and Beige will be heralded as the new Beige!
Ah, fashion, you have arrived in the techie world!
A.
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 ?
I'm managing a small network.. my boss ordered that every new system will be out of the EVO line from Compaq.. "stylisch black with a scent of silver". I'm allready bored by this fenomenon as i was with the beige outfits.. but anything beats the lollypop colors mixed with beige you see on the list of all those case manufacturers in an attempt to look a bit more fashionable...
Wait, so can I still wear white once the summer is over? I'm confused!
... all the cases were huge things, usually powder-coated in dark brown or black "crackle-effect" stuff. Big chunky CP/M machines came on the market with black anodised aluminium front panels, big LED's and wood-effect outer cases. Now *they* were cool cases...
Give me transparent or brushed metal cases any day.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
...in the article about the toolbox PC that the guy used some sort of vinyl color from an auto paint store. So the question become, why not change the color yourself? Case mods are case mods after all.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
"It's a new library; it's even black"
"That means it's new, does it?"
"Oh, yes!"
To be honest, I find the black better; we have a ton of older IBM kit and it just looks... well, old. The black looks more modern.
Of course, the problem many of us will have with our PCs is a Frankenstein system as we have a beige case with black CD/floppy drives (or vice versa) as we upgrade. We're already having issues like that with some Sun Ultra 80s having black DVD drives (to match the Sunblades and servers).
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?
PC Fashionistas exclaim, "Black is the new Beige!"
I sure hope we're not going to read an article two weeks from now which explains some computing error, and how the new fashionable color is actually something one could describe as a dusty mint color.
And please don't let them correct themselves again claiming that it's chic to use a sort of salmon/melon/peach color. I couldn't stand to boot up a computer of which the casing reminded me of tuna sashimi.
[
I don't know why the article doesn't mention it, but it seems obvious that the post 9/11 fashion craze is that working for the spook shops is cool and that therefore we're all going black with NeXT Cube Retro. It's sort of like McCarthyesque 50's Retro but with that "Think Different" counter-culture 'tude.
Seastead this.
I took an old PC case I had and used some stone spray (with the rough stone particles in it) on it. It looked like granite afterwards, pretty cool. The case was heavy anyway, so it was quite fitting :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Why can't computers companies get this fine point of consumerism right?
_ __
Dell is a perfect example. I think that the Optiplex series make fine corporate desktops. Still the latest black case with a slightly odd front shape does not make it stylish in the least. In fact, in some ways they are actually uglier than the plain jane Optiplex GX110 I have in my cube.
I don't care if its a cube or aluminum or has a winodw in the side or some combo. It seems that people like Compaq and Dell ought to have enough money to hire some industrial designers to come up with a nicier looking more functional case.
_______________________________________________
ACK
goatse.cx link hidden in Google URL above.
Yes folks its Cosmos "Desktop and Tower Outfits for the girl about town"
Feb: Black is back, everything will be black for ever
May: Beige is the new Black
June: Curved monitors are the new Flat Screens
July: Oooh look at the pretty iMac and "how to make your keyboard match your nail polish"
Sept: Black is back
November: The must have USB accessories of the season, can you use your USB security key as an earing.. ifs its the D&G one you can
December: Your Colour Therapy Horoscope for the coming year, how the colour of your PC case can change your life.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
...the original Apple II in 1977. Steve Jobs wanted a neutral color that would blend in to the average home.
Back in the days before the PC architecture became king, Radio Shack used to sell computers with SILVER CASES. I distinctly remember people taking sandpaper to the cases to get to the BLACK primer underneath.
There was also a number of WHITE cases sold by the various clone manufacturers during the mid 1990's.
The picture in the NY Times article shoes a person painting a PC case. Perhaps that's the way to go. Someone should offer HANDPAINTED PC cases to people. You could have themes endorsed by various celebrities and artists.
Funny they didn't mention Dell, since they are one of the largest retailers. I don't think any of their stuff is beige anymore.
Black cases have been available for years from such companies as Antec, Siliconrax, and others for years. How is this different?
There are also numerous industrial PC companies that are happy to provide cases in whatever color the buyer chooses. I guess I'm just having trouble seeing why this piece is newsworthy...?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Any more ideas?
Apple still can't meet demand. They don't really need extra gimmicks. 150,000 iMac preorders in the first weekend (IIRC) and they've shipped 220,000 iMac to so far this year. Check out their financial report.
"I think Beige has the most RAM..." -- Dilbert's Boss
:)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
In my opinion Coolermaster makes the best damn cases I've ever seen. Combine that with an enermax power supply and your in business. The Cooler Master ATC-210 is particularly awesome. You can buy them at a good price from monarch.
. com/powersupply.htmlc om
http://www.coolermaster.com
http://www.xpcgear
http://www.monarchcomputer.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It's not black, and it's not beige, but it's damn sexy
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 to the days of the ZX Spectrum, eh? :)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Who cares about black? I want computers that look like these. May also have the benifit of being theft proof without a forklift, and plenty of room for the tank of liquid nitrogen to cool that over-clocked Athlon
The school I work for has tons of black Dell Optiplex machines sitting near windows without any issues.
Ugh. This reminds me of the horror stories I had back when I was home-delivering computers for CompUSSR...
Horror Story 1: Delivered an HP something-or-other with 15" monitor to some 40 year old yuppie woman. She wants the thing setup on her roll-top desk. Only problem is that with the monitor setup, the roll-top wouldn't close. Rather than just leaving the roll-top open, though, or moving the computer to some other desk (of which she had plenty), we had to find her a monitor that would fit under that roll-top. We end up putting a floor model 15" that had a slightly different form, but was over a year older. All because the roll-top had to close.
Horror Story 2: Another female yuppie comes in and drops 3 grand on the hottest piece of Compaq hardware in the place. Top of the line everything (at that time, forget the specs). She also gets a big-ass nice monitor, Laserjet, scanner, the whole nine yards. Home-Office setup to the max.
I show up and start setting up this computer underneath the desk she wants her monitor/scanner/etc on, but no, it can't go under there. The tower has to be in that closet 8 feet away. And I want to be able to keep the door closed at all times too. Oh, and I want the speakers on these two little end-tables on opposite ends of the room. We end up drilling a fucking whole through the wall, running a big mass of extender cables underneath the carpet, and giving this ho a free pair of wireless speakers to accomodate her. And because we had to extend the video so far, a $500 monitor with hot-shit video card ends up looking like a color television from 1955. But that's OK, because the computer has to be in the closet out of site, instead of just underneath the computer desk which was designed to have a computer underneath it.
It hurts when I pee.
It's sitting underneath your desk. I have more important things to do than say:
"Hey, look at my fucking computer. Look at that shit right there. You see that, motherfucker? That's a sweet looking machine. It's sweet enough that I could fuck one of its ports in the back. And look at that fucking neon light in it! Bad ass! You see how I ran my cables right there? Fucking 'leet, ain't it? And look at this shit over here, that's a goddamn SCSI card, bitch. You see the little red light on the card? That shit actually came with it, those fuckers at Adaptec already slammed the card before I even got it! Hey, shitface, get back over here, I'm not done showing you my 'rig'. That right there is a fucking CD burner, ass-fucker. You see that? I can burn a CD so fucking fast it'd scare the fucking RIAA, man. And would you fucking look at this shit! Holy fucking shit! This is a fucking DVD-ROM drive. I can watch fucking *movies* and shit on this motherfucker. *MOVIES*! And look right here. This case has no fewer than fucking 10 fans! 10, motherfucker! It sounds like a goddamn freight train up in this motherfucker! Or a fucking plane taking off at the fucking airport! Hey, bitch, speaking of airport, let me show you my slammed fucking laptop, this damn this is choice..."
I gotta say, reading that almost made my fall out of my seat laughing. Flamebait, yes, but it should get a balancing "Funny" moderation as well, because come on, folks, that shit is funny!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
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
the Apple II was issued in black version a by Bell and Howe,this was in the early 1980's
Free cell phone tracking
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.
user:slashdot314 pass:slashdot
Look, guys... It's a computer. It's a tool, not an objet d'art. Shove it under your desk and forget about it already! Who cares what flippin' color it is? In a couple months it'll have that "accumulated dust" veneer anyway.
Now, quit messing with those case mods and get back to something important. Like desktop themes.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
that Pink was the new Black?!?!!
*must turn in goth membership card*
Originally, the new PC color was TURQUOISE.
However, after an extensive study, researches at the Fashion Dept. at John Hopkins University discovered a slight color-wheel miscalculation in their assessment of the Spring 2002 PC line.
It turns out now, that Beige is the new black.
I think they got that backwards...
Isn't beige the new black ??
http://www.acornworld.net/~jmayrand/B%26H.html
OK, yeah we all hate yuppies, and LUsers as well, but geez, who cares what these women (and yes, you seem to think their gender is relevant here) want to do with their _own property_? If they want to run 8 feet of video cable to their monitor, and you get paid to do it, where's the bad? These are mass-manufactured objects, it's not like a work of art is being shut away in that closet... And personally, if I had a roll top desk, I'd want it to close too. They're cool. Granted, the design pre-dates PC's, but if this lady wanted the two to work together, good for her. Don't be so judgmental, a contemptuous geek is not a pretty thing :-(
Freedom: "I won't!"
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.
I doubt it. Once you go black, you'll never go back.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Who care what color the case is - The computer is in one of two states:
1)It's under the desk, and you can't see it
2)It's on top of the desk, and the cover is off
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Been there...
Done that...
Really dark blue is even more nifty then black if you get the shade right.Painting the bits of plastic is usually a problem but the boxes themselves can be painted no probs.
The best choice are car repair kit paints. They are a bit more expensive but spread better and have better coverage.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
2 Years ago I took apart my case, took it outside and spraypainted it black. I did the same with the drive bezels and the keyboard (but not the keys). There was a grey panel for the switches, leds, fan, etc. that was grey. I painted it a nice, slightly orange, yellow, the only other color I had at the time. After reassembling it, and replacing the Tux doll sitting on top, I was astonished at how well the colors/proportions/locations matched. I had inadvertantly created a computer that looked like Tux. I wish I had taken pictures. Unfortuneately, that computer is dead, replaced by a shiny heavy duty brushed aluminum vault from coolermaster. Various parts of "Tux" were scavenged to put a computer inside an aluminum briefcase. Oh well.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
One of these?
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
If you're wearing all black then it's Okey Dokey to button up that top button on your shirt!
But be warned - wearing short pants that expose hairy calves is still considered gauche!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This is nice until I want to upgrade my brand new black machine. I go to Best Buy and pull the latest bargain drive off the shelf, put it in my box, and stare at my new black-and-beige creation, ugly as hell.
I suppose I could always paint it, but I never had to do that before and I don't really want to now. I suppose I could switch to all external devices *sigh*.
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?"
...until women stopped looking for the "little black dress". Now they'll be shopping for the "little black box".
I think black boxen look great, but if you have a dust problem, you will end up cleaning your boxen every day. This problem is especially apparent if you have multiple boxen in a small confined area. My black Klipsch promedia speakers look filfy, 24 hours after cleaning them. Beige works well because it hides the dirt. It may not be pretty, but it sure is practical.
If everyone used #000000 black, it would be fine. All black things would be black. But Dell's black is really dark grey, and someone else's black is really navy blue, and someone else's is a lighter dark grey. Looks almost as silly as having 4 drives that are 4 different shades of beige, none of which are the shade of the case.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
This article has an interesting sidebar in the paper edition regarding the Altair which chose "a classy powder blue exterior" instead of beige as the color for it's pc's.
Best quote: "..the company chose blue because of the blue mainframe computers used by IBM, as if to suggest that the inexpensive, general-purpose Altair microcomputer was also a real computer"
That doesn't mean that if your box dies on Monday that a guy will be out there to fix it Tuesday.
This is exactly the reason I don't buy my equipment over the internet or phone. I shop locally, at a Ma & Pop store. Sure I pay more, but I have a personal relationship with these people, they know me and even sent my wife flowers when she was in the hospital. When I have a problem with a warrantied item, I take it in and the next day I pick it up, easy as that. Once when I was having problems with a Sound Blaster Live card, the owner of the shop took my machine home with him and worked on it all night, so he could have it for me the next day. It turned out to be a compatibility issue between the MSI motherboard and the SBL card, both worked fine without the other. They swapped my motherboard for another brand and it has worked like a champ ever since. You can NOT get this kind of service from Dell, Alienware or any of the other big boys. If I shopped at Dell, I'd just be a drop in thier bucket, but at this shop, I am one of thier best customers and they treat me well.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Operation Infinite Loop!! paint yer server Camo. Let's see we have desert grey, desert blue, desert brown, brown, green, green brown, brown grey, granite, low contrast dusk, black grey, air superiority grey and sunday finest redneck gold
My next case will probbaly be a Lian-Li PC68, brushed aluminum. Yeah it's going to be a bitch to find drive faces to match but it'll destroy my current beige box in every way.
I can find rounded cables galore now, so why is it so hard to find a DVD drive with an aluminum faceplate?
Hmm... maybe be it's just me, but making a translucent case doesn't strike me as being terribly innovative. Stylish is more accurate (IMHO).
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
...a lot like todays audio equipment. The crap will look like this and the better stuff like this. Expect all visible surfaces to be manufactured from brushed aluminium, chrome and glass. The quality of the product will be inverse to the number of blinking lights in the front.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
here and here
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
"It's like space without the stars."
"It's like a pastel black."
"How much more black could this be? And the answer is... none... none more black."
-- SpinalTap (reminiscing on the color black.)
"And like that
--- Steve Jobs on Design ---
Fortune Magazine: What has always distinguished the products of the
companies you've led is the design aesthetic. Is your obsession with design
an inborn instinct or what?
Steve Jobs: We don't have good language to talk about this kind of thing.
In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating.
It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be
further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a
man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers
of the product or service. The iMac is not just the colour or translucence or
the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible
consumer computer in which each element plays together.
On our latest iMac, I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is
much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time.
That was not just "Steve's decision" to pull out the fan; it required an
enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do
a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest
thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started.
This is what customers pay us for--to sweat all these details so it's easy
and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good
at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for
them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely
like it.
fortune - january 24, 2000
regards,
john penner
---| swoopy curves Are Not design |---
Certainly, the PC industry has never revered design, preferring blocky
beige boxes or, more recently, coloured go-faster curves devoid of real
function. He's scornful of those who use 'swoopy shapes to look good,
stuff that is so aggressively designed, just to catch the eye. I think
that's arrogance, it's not done for the benefit of the user.'
By contrast, he says, "you won't be able to find a single thing on an
Apple that hasn't had thought put into it"...
With the first iMac the goal wasn't to look different, but to build the
best integrated consumer computer we could. If as a consequence the shape
is different, then that's how it is. The thing is, it's very easy to be
different, but very difficult to be better. That's what we have tried to
do with the new iMac."
(THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, Interview with Jonathan Ive,
Charles Arthur talks to the designer of the iMac, January 14 2002)
--
regards,
john penner
And for the fine detailing work, on things like nonremovable floppy and DVD drive bezels, get a matte or glossy black paint marker so that you can paint it in place without having to disassemble it.
I got my paint marker at a gun store, where they are sold as touchup markers to fill in scratches on black milspec finishes, but I think art stores carry them too.
Black is pretty sweet, especially once you get a black IBM monitor with a Trinitron tube, like my stealth black G96.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
IBM's high-end PCs ("workstations") have been black for years. So are most of their rackmount systems. This is news?
Spray-painting is kind of awkward, since to do it right you really have to disassemble the monitor, and there is apparently a shock hazard there.
Any experiences with other makes of black monitor? When I did my search, these were the companies I found that were selling black monitors:
I also found Directron to be handy, as they have a whole page full of black system components.
I haven't found a good black keyboard yet. Ideally, they'd start making the good IBM buckling-spring keyboards in black again, and it has been rumored they will, but I have yet to see them for sale. Right now I have a cheapo $19.00 IBM black keyboard, but it really sucks and I want to get rid of it.
Any suggestions? Spray paint is not a good suggestion for the keyboard, since you lose all the lettering.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
My friend and I decided to build new PCs at the same time to save cash on shipping etc. We both purchased Antec 1240 towers (If you've never seen them, these things are huge. The top of my machine has maybe a half inch of clearence with the bottom of my desk, and I have a rather tall desk.). The only dissapointment was that these cases weren't availible in black (through our supplier anyway). Anyway, my friend came up with a sweet idea for a case mod. First of all, we paint the cases black. The case is completely modular so we can remove everything and paint it seperately (except the top part, which involves removal of pop rivets). Then on one side, we dremel out a trapezoid (actually, we should do this before painting..). Then we take a sheet of non-yellowing Lucite, cut a trapezoid a bit larger on all sides then the one on the case. We stencil on a design, fill in some spaces with black paint, and mount it on the side, painted side facing inward, with 1/4 inch bolts with polished heads (for that industrial look). To complete the mod, we'll (eventually) purchase lights to mount in the top of the case. My friend's plan is to stencil a biohazard logo on the Lucite, black out the parts that are normally red on the logo, allowing yellow light to shine through the logo itself. Also, the light should be visible around the edges of the Lucite.
We went to the local Home Hardware a few weeks ago and already purchased some water-based (to avoid the chance of melting the plastic bezel because the cases are 300$CDN a piece) gloss black paint, a 2 foot x 4 foot sheet of Lucite, 16 polished 1/4 inch bolts, 16 1/4 inch nuts and 2 paint brushes. This should be enough to do the 2 Antecs as well as the case of my old Linux machine (as a test).
Total cost: 50$ canadian total, so 25$ each (not including the lighting of course). And we should have more then enough Lucite left over to do at least a few more cases. So with a little luck, this might just pay for itself. We intend to do this sometime next month when it's dry enough out for the paint to dry quickly. These wicked cases just got a little more wicked.
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.
...that one or more of these "female yuppies" thought you were kind of cute and kept dreaming up little add-ons and carpentry projects to keep you around her apartment long enough to see what might happen next?
3Dcool makes some really cool looking modded cases using automotive paint but they're out of my price range :(.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I got paid my hourly rate. What ticks you off, though, is when a customer comes in, drops $39.95 for home deliverly/setup (or gets it free depending on how spineless the sales guy was), and when you get out there it turns into a Task of Hercules. Meanwhile after 4 hour installs you come back and the manager wonders why you can't keep that $80/hr productivity number up.
What it basically comes down to is that sales jockeys and managers of retail computer stores fold like a house of cards anytime a customer says Boo. I can't tell you how many times I heard, "But the salesman/manager said you'd do X". And your right, customer service pretty much demands that you do it. If a customer wants to put their box in the fucking fridge, fine, pay me enough and I'll do it with a smile. Just don't expect me to come out there willing bend over backwards for your pittance delivery fee simply because you think the Compaq logo clashes with the carpet.
It hurts when I pee.
Beige gave way years ago. Remember when everything that was trying to be funky came out teal? Well, orange is the new teal. If you want to be funky and new at the moment, but not actually be risky and innovative, then go for orange.
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
I have posted this before in long detail, so let me make it short;
:) It is pretty darn nifty how the color of computer cases has kept on getting lighter and lighter and lighter and then all of a sudden switched to black!
I FUCKING LIKE BEIGE BOXS DAMNIT
and if this gets moded to +1 funny like it did last time I am SOOO going to hurt someone, I AM SERIOUS. BEIGE IS GOOD DAMNIT.
Beige, Steel, Strong. Full tower, steel, beige cases rock.
Black computers, meh. I would rather go function over form.
Besides since I have computer equipment from so many different eras, I have a pretty darn nice gradient of beige.
No wait, that black part is bad.
I LIKE BEIGE DAMNIT.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Manufacturers selling over the web offer you a choice of color and or style for your plain vanilla computer guts? Why not. To a limited degree this is probably happening, but not by major players, yet.
That depends on who manufactures your video card. You can get currently get blue, bright red, yellow, amber, neon green, and regular old fashioned PCB-green too.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
on the front page, you'll get a little insight into why boxes have remained beige for so long, and that a modest, nondescript color (black) is its most popular successor.
Most people don't intend to derive satisfaction from the case that holds their computer hardware. They would rather *do* something with their computer. A relatively basic familiarity with computers tends to associate computing with the output of the computer, and users will tend to look at the picture in the box on top of or beside or away from the computer case. (Maybe combining the monitor with the case is a symptom of an inferiority complex -- if you don't want to look at the case, maybe integrate the case with the screen so it looks like you're looking at it) -- within the UI itself, most people aren't too concerned about how the UI makes them feel inside, they are more interested in what it lets them do.
and the break key was red
Yep, and luckily I have images turned off by default.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
we need to get back to fake woodgrain. Like on Ataris