They still look good.
Just commit a minute drug offense in the USA, and you can experience transparent electronics again.
Forget colour. That generation iMac was incredibly repairable compared to today’s Apple stuff. Two screws on the back panel and the whole internal tray slides out. Every major component’s immediately accessible. And all repair parts were available.
Though, with the caveat that the computer stuff is integrated with the CRT which stores a potentially deadly high voltage for quite a while after being unplugged. Which doesn’t mean it’s not repairable, it certainly is especially by an independent shop with trained technicians, but it was still very clearly not meant to be repaired by the user with no prior experience. IIRC there were older Macs with integrated monitors that had the computer parts more or less separated from the monitor parts, which were comparatively safer.
Mind you, this carried over to fairly recent iMac models, because up until the M1 iMacs, they had their power supply as just a bare PCB right beside the motherboard with no separate enclosure, and modern switched mode power supplies also have capacitors that store deadly voltages long after being unplugged (as in, higher voltages than from the wall, they step up the voltage before stepping it back down which allows them to use more energy efficient components). While there’s a lot to dislike about discrete power adapters for everything, they are definitively safer especially for people doing repairs because all the dangerous high voltage stuff is self-contained and separate from the actual device itself (and allows you to very easily replace the power supply with zero disassembly).
Isn’t the 2DS from more than 10 years after most of these?
it was also almost 8 years ago already.
They did it for nostalgic reasons I guess.
Glacier N64 is best N64
Loved the N64, but that was one of their worst controller designs ever (not the color, but the shape/layout).
what made it a bad design?
The hard plastic analog stick gave you blisters if you played the first Mario Party too much. The wire had a great mouth feel.
I never owned one, but played plenty of my friends N64’s. The controller has three different handle positions, so you had to move your hand from one spot (for pressing directional buttons) to another spot to use the joystick.
I’m sure eventually you’d get used to it and not think twice about it. But it was definitely a unique controller design
Where there games that did this? From what I remember, you either used the analog stick and the z button or the d-pad with the Left shoulder button.
The idea behind the design was that you would use the stick OR the d-pad. Not both.
So you weren’t awkwardly switching how you held the controller all the time.
This was the only way to know if ants are living in your Nintendo and they’re going to fry a circuit somewhere.
It’s a wasteful we moved away from this design.
I think that is more a problem that you need to clean up your room more and properly dispose of your candy wrappers. Gross.
If you’re not supposed to store candy in the cartridge slot when not playing, then I don’t want to be right!
Ants can come from anywhere and they find the electricity plus warmth of a game of Mario kart attractive.
This was Pavlov (or rather one of his many twins).
He was in my friends’ dorm room in college.
His name was Pavlov because you had to respond to him when the bell rang.
Unpopular opinion: Making shit out of translucent plastic was the single fugliest way to make a product, and I’m glad it’s gone.
I hold a grudge against the translucent plastic fad.
Once upon a time the Linux workstation at my desk at $CHIP_COMPANY was built into a noname transparent teal ATX case. For that reason I gave it the hostname “fugly”.
We had excessive field failures with some of our chips, and I was tasked with coming up with a way to identify those bad parts at customer sites. My solution was a bootable Linux CD that would run a test and tell the customer if they need to contact us for a recall. The test relied on a modified Linux kernel, so it couldn’t be distributed as an application. I used “fugly” to develop and build the test, patched kernel, and CD image.
The test was deployed, the first few customers were pleased, and I got a wood plaque and bonus for my efforts.
A few weeks later, my manager called me into her office looking uncharacteristically pissed off. She asked why I put a message saying “fugly” into the CD. A customer complained about it, saying they saw “fugly” on the screen when the test was running, and while it did it’s job it was unprofessional. A split second of confusion before I realized what happened: at boot time the Linux kernel prints the name of the machine it was compiled on, in this case
fugly.team.company.com. It scrolls past quickly on boot, so neither I nor my collaborators ever noticed. Somehow the customer latched onto it.I ended up with a slap on the wrist, being put on PIP for 6 months and having to change the hostname because higher-ups needed their pound of flesh.
Coincidentally, a week after this incident, Toyota posted a billboard at a major intersection near our office advertising the Scion xB that read “Funky? Or Fugly?”.
A 6 month PIP for A NAME?!? Yes, we’re going to improve your naming conventions over the next 6 months. You better improve! Obviously it’s so a manager could tell another manager that “it won’t happen again.” But, fuck that.
My manager was understanding after I explained that it was unintentional. But it made support and sales look bad in front of the customer, and in a cascade of finger pointing the director of our department decided that would convince everyone that justice had been done.
Yeah, definitely just a bunch of fluff. Still ridiculous that we live in a world where that happens. Then the sales manager went to the customer and goes “LoOk ThE eMpLoYeE wAs RePrImAnDeD. Still give money?👉🏻👈🏻”
Gross.
“Of course the test said fugly. Fugly is the name of one of the professional industry tools we use to compile code. The reason for its name is an obscure piece of technical history that would take me much too long to explain, but rest assured, it’s a well respected technology.”
If Git can get away with this excuse then you should be able to as well.
Whst’s a PIP?
Performance Improvement Plan. Corporate probation. It’s more common to see people put on PIP for low performance than managerial CYA for dumb mistakes like mine.
It heavily depends on the company as to what it means, but at this job I would have been fired if I got another PIP within that 6 months. I live in an at-will employment state, so if it weren’t just a performative gesture then they would have just fired me.
Performance Improvement Plan
I agree with you, except for the atomic purple Gameboy Color. That was the shit
I believe that history will remember the atomic purple GameBoy color as the apogee of 20th century design, practicality and classiness.
You are allowed to have an incorrect opinion.
I purposely swapped the case to my Steam Deck to be translucent because you are wrong :-p
You know what? I’d agree but it’s probably for a different reason. Back then I thought this shit was the ugliest thing. Looking back now I kinda miss it but I think it’s the nostalgia from it.
It’s not even that for me, it’s just that now everything looks the same which is boring.
Gotta love that prison aesthetic.
I was gonna say this is still standard for Prison game systems due to regulatory standards making sure you’re not hiding any shanks or cocaine inside them.
I love the translucent vibe. It shows exactly what makes the device work which the nerd in me just can’t get enough of. Nowadays it seems like tech companies are more and more trying to hide the actual electronics and technology aspect of their products and marketing them more as magic black boxes.
If you ever get into actual magick, you’ll find that the mechanical details of its workings are just as transparent and fascinating as electronics.
Actually, magic is a lot like computer programming. To the non-initiated, there’s a lot of incantations and spells that simply don’t seem to make any sense.
Yoooo shout-out to the new translucent purple 8bitdo controller I picked up recently!
Oh no, do I need ANOTHER 8bitdo controller…?
Yes but you must ask: do I go Pro 2 for the handles or Pro 1 for the more authentic SNES feel. Both are glorious.
I have a couple of the pros (1?) that are great and are still hanging in there.
The SNES style one is tempting…
Now color is used as a marketing trick.
“This generation of Iphones comes in new colours never before seen on an Iphone! So you better buy the latest one or people will think you are poor.”
“More features? Why you’d need that? You got different colours!”
So in my eyes, it is yet an other good thing ruined by marketing.
I mean, the items in this post were definitely made that way for marketing. The color of the plastic doesn’t change the functionality at all but it often was more expensive to get the special colors, or only limited quantities were produced. “Special editions” is a tried and true marketing tactic that goes back much further than the 90s.
Translucent plastic serves an important function in prisons, where guards are scared prisoners will hide contraband in computers.
How has color ever been used for anything other than trying to make your product look more appealing?
Looking pretty is probably top of the list but there is also:
- hazard labelling
- visibility (i.e. don’t buy green-handled garden tools, unless you want to lose them every time you put them down)
- clearly showing where the buttons are, or marking different sections of an object
- helping to locate different, very similar things (imagine if all your USB sticks were the same colour)
- cost of different coloured materials
- individual identity of object “my drill is turquoise, your drill is yellow”
- to warn off predators
Yo man the job site guys who are arguing over color tools are just trying to fill the shitty day and get a check.
I mean, maybe if your product is something where the color is part of the function, like paint or such
This is incredibly try-hard mate. Don’t let Apple live rent free in your head like that lol
Be the change you want to see. I’ve stopped EVER buying black, dark gray, or silver colored stuff unless there is no other option. It’s great. Harder to lose, easier to find, rarely gets confused with similar products owned by coworkers, etc…
you can do that with steam deck
I’m strongly considering it now…
You can, but as someone who just replaced his own screen, the process is daunting! Mostly sticking new adhesive on a screen and making sure the cables are secure. Upside, ifixit is an official partner and the whole thing was built with repairability in mind.
If that process is worth a translucent case, that’s up to you!
Colorful transparent plastic is nostalgic and tacky, like those object shaped rubber bands/bracelets. On one hand its a bit ugly and clashes with modern aesthetic, on the other the pop of color makes it stand out and seeing the insides of your electronics is kind of novel, dare I say radical
Cowabunga dude
Retro Handhelds are helping to bring it back.
Also yeah yeah Steam Deck shells. Sorry I don’t want to waste one whole perfectly functional plastic shell just to buy even more future plastic pollution because it’s slightly cooler looking.
It means you have a spare. Nobody said you needed to throw anything away.
Or I could just continue using the perfectly serviceable shell I’ve got, because realistically it’s more likely to outlast the rest of the device anyway, and I’m still producing less plastic waste by abstaining from getting something I know I don’t need.
