Well, the developer release of Panther has been in the hands of eager code monkeys for a week, now, so there's no end of info on Apple's next major Mac OS X release floating around the 'net-- not to mention screenshots, screenshots, screenshots! If you dig a little, you won't have much trouble finding all sorts of nifty little tidbits that didn't quite make the cut at last week's WWDC Stevenote. (We're enjoying this FunMac thread in particular, as originally noted over at MacRumors. Nothing's niftier than seeing entire interface windows labeled "To be implemented...") But we're in a lousy mood today, so rather than focus on all the great new stuff Panther already has to offer (such as the option to overwrite trashed files with random junk 35 times, so no one will ever be able to prove that you actually downloaded a Spice Girls video), we're going to point out that beige is officially over-- and black isn't that far behind.

Now, of course you already knew that beige is so last-three-decades-of-the-20th-century, but regardless, some stubborn Fashion Don'ts out there are still using beige Power Mac G3s to get some actual work done-- and in a current operating system, no less; Jaguar's System Requirements page explicitly lists the "Beige Power Mac G3" as a supported system. But as far as Panther's concerned, beige is downright Nowheresville, and not just from a style perspective. We were poking around through Think Secret's coverage of the Panther developer release and noticed that, sure enough, the system requirements appear to have changed: the only Power Mac G3 still supported is the Blue & White.

And beige isn't the only passé hue that dropped off the A-list; looks like even basic black is out-- to a degree. Whereas Jaguar is supported on the entire PowerBook G3 Series (there's a picture of the original Wall Street model on the requirements page), Panther now requires at minimum a "PowerBook G3 with built-in USB"-- meaning, Lombard and onwards. (In other words, black is okay as long as you accessorize properly.) Now, granted, we're talking about five-and-a-half-, even six-year-old Macs, here, so it's not entirely outrageous that Apple won't support them in its new Mac OS X revision... but what if the reason why Apple excluded support for these models wasn't technical at all, but entirely based on style? How long before Bondi Blue gets it in the neck? Or Tangerine? Is any hue safe from Apple's grand vision of "metal for the pros, white for everyone else"?

Of course, this is just a developer release, so there's still a chance that the final version will accommodate beige G3s and Wall Street PowerBooks, but personally we consider that about as likely as Jonathan Ive sporting a mullet and chugging a Mountain Dew. But here's the real question: will our beige G3 boot into Panther if we spray-paint it silver first?