Black Is The New Beige 406
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)."
These guys have color too (Score:5, Interesting)
psxndc
NeXT (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
CD-Rom and drive bay covers . . . (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Hmm.. can't paint on black! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Black Apple ][ (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What about rackmount? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Evan
Desktop cases (Score:3, Interesting)
sgi... (Score:2, Interesting)
why not change color on the fly? (Score:2, Interesting)
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?"
Black computers are new and hip; black pagers not (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [dcmilitary.com]:
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.
Automotive Paint (Score:3, Interesting)
looking beyond color (Score:3, Interesting)
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.