
Slideshow: What vendors consider sexy design - abennett
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/76767/slideshow-what-vendors-consider-sexy-design
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diiq
Does anyone else find these terminally unattractive? They're super-ellipsoids
with the occasional meaningless chunk cut out.

What happened to my sixties future, where the supercomputers were shiny slick
hospital white or the nineties when desktops were okudagrams, or at least the
80's when computers _surrounded_ you with information and controls? Or how
about the streamlined future of the thirties, when things at least looked
fast.

Sexy design of racks ought to make me trust that the machine will run until
the year 5421, possibly in zero-g while tended by a woman in Velcro booties
and a spherical hat.

Sexy design of user machines ought to make me feel like a genius because of
the obvious power at my disposal, to be used with bravado because it's clearly
too smart to be broken. I won't want to let it out of my sight because I'm
afraid it will find a new user. Withdrawal symptoms probable.

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rbanffy
As I said a couple hours ago, I like the z9. It looks powerful. The HP is
futuristic. The desktops are either dated or Mac-ish. Macs are pretty, but
don't look powerful or sexy. As for the rackmounts, they are all boring. Very
boring.

The problem these days is conformity. Desktops must run Windows, so, they have
to be x86s - and those are boring chips - and have a certain number of keys
and a certain set of ports. They can't differentiate much. The farthest I saw
was a couple Macs with notebook-style keyboards. No F13~24, no Sun-like added
keypad to the left. Conformity castrated industrial designers.

And servers must be rack-mountable, so that limits what a designer can do with
it. Not even Frog Design can save us now. Even Sun, who had good taste by the
early 90's was selling an atrociously ugly 22" LCD with their boxy überPCs.

Meh... These are utterly boring times.

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chaosmachine
Original article with bigger pictures:

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9014161/Slideshow_Wha...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9014161/Slideshow_What_vendors_consider_sexy_design)

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rbanffy
The IBM z9 is very interesting and the HP BladeSystem enclosure could be
enclosed in an air-conditioned tube in the front lobby of any company.

But sexy servers are a hard sell. We will see a lot of rack-mountable dull-
looking boxes. Any attempt to make them pretty is little more than lipstick on
a pig.

There could be some space for good looking computers on the desktop. Where is
Sun and NeXT when you need them? ;-)

