They may also mark 1999 as the start of the PC renaissance, when manufacturers finally started to get it: design matters. This holiday season, computer shoppers will enjoy unprecedented variety in shapes, sizes and colors–and not just in Apple’s groundbreaking line of translucent iMacs and iBooks. Nearly every major PC maker now has innovative desktop designs on the way to market, from hourglass-sculpted towers to flat-panel displays with all the processing innards packed into the base. Among industrial designers, who still think the PC has a long way before you’ll want to display it on your mantle, the only question is, what took so long? “The PC industry has ridiculed design for a long time,” says Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design. “They have not respected their customers and have underestimated their desires.”
PC makers are finally catching on–and it’s partly out of desperation. Manufacturers used to sell computers by trumpeting their techno bells and whistles, like processor speed and memory. But since ever-faster chips have given us more power on the desktop than we could ever possibly use, computer makers have been competing on price–a strategy that has dropped most units below $1,000 and slashed profits. Last week IBM limped from the battlefield, announcing it would pull its lagging Aptiva line from store shelves and sell it only on the Web. Competing only on price “made an industry shakeout inevitable,” says Nick Donatiello, president of the marketing-research firm Odyssey.
It’s Steve Jobs’s resurgent Apple that has shown the way out. The iMac’s Popsicle colors and curvy figure have demonstrated that consumers are willing to pay more for a stylized design and a no-hassle connection to the Internet. Since the iMac’s debut last year, Apple has sold 2 million units, though lately it has underestimated demand, resulting in costly shortages of the iBook and the new version of the iMac.
Nevertheless, other companies are following Apple, some more subtly than others. In August, low-cost computer maker eMachines debuted an all-in-one box PC sheathed in translucent blue plastic, dubbed eOne. Apple promptly sued over the design similarity. Last week Gateway introduced its $799 Astro, which squeezes the whole computer behind a 15-inch monitor. It’s still that familiar coffee-stained beige, though clip-on colored handles will go on sale next year. And Austin-based PC maker Dell plans to unveil a black hourglass-shaped slimtower line of computers, called WebPC, later this fall.
There’s also a design upheaval going on at the high end of the price spectrum, where manufacturers can still eke out a respectable profit. Sony’s latest Vaio Slimtop, announced last week, boasts a flat-panel display and a gray tower with violet trimmings. Sony used pricier notebook components to create the desktop device, which is 70 percent smaller than a normal computer and weighs a feathery 12 pounds.
And that’s only the beginning. Chip makers such as Intel are creating new specs for circuit boards that will shrink PC sizes by getting rid of support for old “legacy” technologies, like floppy disk drives. At its developer’s forum this summer, Intel invited design firms to present concepts based on the new blueprints. One came back with a computer shaped like a leopard-skin ottoman. The BUBs better watch out.
