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More On The Bandwagon (11/4/99)
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For those who doubted that the iMac would have an impact on computer style industry-wide, doubt no more. The iMac clones are one thing-- it was utterly predictable that at least a few companies would go for the cheap score by simply copying Apple's design. It's a better indication of Apple's influence, though, when the big-name PC manufacturers start adopting iMac-like color choices. Dell was one of the first, unsurprisingly, with its iBook-inspired consumer laptops, available in two colors. Given Mike Dell's psychotic fixation on Steve Jobs, one might be tempted to write that off as an anomaly. But now Hewlett-Packard is offering its customers a choice of computer colors, and that's no fluke.
Yes, Hewlett-Packard-- the computer megagiant best described as "stodgy." They are Old Iron; they are Geeks-R-Us, with their UNIX workstations and their scientific calculators. They are the Beigest of the Beige. And yet, as faithful viewer Arthur Frame points out in an HP press release, they are offering "case, keyboard, and mouse color options" now that beige is a four-letter word. (Bayj?) Oh, sure, they haven't totally ditched their geeky tendencies; whereas Apple's colors are named whimsically after fruit flavors, HP's are "inspired by the elements of the periodic table": cobalt blue, krypton green, xenon purple, and the default titanium gray. But hey, we're not averse to Geek Chic.
In fact, we kind of like the way that different manufacturers are using the whole "theme names" thing. Apple's got candy fruit flavors-- after naming a translucent blue-green after the water at a beach in Australia, that is. Dell uses "Storm Grey" and "Tahoe Blue," so they've got a sort of water/weather thing going on. Now HP's got elements from the periodic table. And it's not just colors, either; there's Intel's chip names, like "Celeron" and "Itanium," which are thematically linked by the fact that both names are unimaginably stupid. See? Everyone can play!
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 11/4/99 episode: November 4, 1999: It's time for Apple to end the naming madness-- are "model years" in store for upcoming Macs? Meanwhile, even straitlaced old Hewlett-Packard is leaping into the color pool, and a Blair Witch Project parody raises serious questions about who's buying Windows...
Other scenes from that episode: 1889: Kicking The Tires (11/4/99) Okay, we all know that when Steve Jobs retook the helm at Apple, the whole product line was a big stinking mess. It's not that the products themselves were particularly bad (well, okay, the Power Mac 4400 belongs in the Apple Hall of Shame), but they revealed a certain lack of direction... 1891: What Everyone Knew (11/4/99) Okay, we admit it-- we're suckers for cheesy theme parodies of pop-culture hits. While we'll run screaming from a lot of the popular dreck that pollutes the waters of our collective media pool (someone tell us just how in hell "Full House" stayed on the air all those years), if you take an insipid show and rewrite it as a parody incorporating elements from some other aspect of popular culture, we're there...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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