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).
Loved the N64, but that was one of their worst controller designs ever (not the color, but the shape/layout).
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.
The three-prong layout was certainly an idea someone had. Having an analog stick on a console controller was innovative at the time, but the implementation of putting it on its own grip so you had to choose between it and the D-pad didn't go so well. There were games that used the D-pad, but most titles published for the system were the newfangled 3D games that were best played with the newfangled analog stick, so in practice most players held the right-hand 2/3rds of their controllers. There were a lot of games where having occasional access to the D pad would have been nice; imagine Majora's Mask with the transformation masks and ocarina bound permanently to the D-pad so you wouldn't have to keep menuing to replace C-button items, especially late in the game.
Sony very quickly studied what was right and what was wrong with Nintendo's approach and they created the Dualshock, which was almost entirely perfect.
At the time the left grip + analog stick was how I played shooters.
Moving with my left hand and aiming with my right made sense to me coming from a mouse/keyboard.
How many shooters were there for the platform? There was Goldeneye, Doom64, and...?
Sure they made it work, but...adding the analog stick to the controller was pure innovation at the time, sure. But the vision for implementation was so fundamentally flawed that a bodge job from Sony bolting two analog sticks to their existing controller was 90 times better.
Doom, quake, turok, goldeneye, perfect dark, duke nukem, Hexen, dark forces and others that used “fps” style movement.
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.
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.
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.
I believe that history will remember the atomic purple GameBoy color as the apogee of 20th century design, practicality and classiness.
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.
Absolutely. I hated that era where everything tried to be an imac. Maximum kitsch.
I was already in my 20s then though, so I really have no childhood nostalgia for that time.
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.
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...
Damn it I was just on the 8bitdo site... the genshin impact chongyun controller.
Note the asterisk...
At the very bottom of the long ass scroll page:
Sounds like a genshin problem. Before I had a steam deck, my go to portable emulator was on Android and I even had a little phone holder thing to stick my 8bitdo controller on since all it need was Bluetooth. Not sure about the ultimate controllers, though, as I wasn't a fan of Xbox layouts.
It indeed is. I have many 8bitdo controllers and have no issues with them. It's the fact that genshin would licence out their characters, ignoring the really weird choice of which, for a controller design on an Android compatible controller while still not supporting controller on just android. It would be one of the easiest changes to do out of likely any other code base out there too.
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.
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....
Do something that puts you in light prison/jail and have friends/family give money to your commissary. I've been in a serious prison and a bunch of the guys had transparent PS2, so you couldn't hide anything in it.
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I bought that model a few years ago and it's gorgeous. I love transparent consoles, especially blue so I've done shell swaps on all of my consoles I can find blue shells for, either official or 3rd party. So far I have a PS2, Wii, and a Switch. I also have transparent blue face plates for a PS5 but I haven't gotten one yet
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
I loved those iMac colors. Our school computer lab had rows of them and it looked soo cool!
I believe that colorfulness directly correlates with happiness.
Also, most of it was japanese AFAIK.
Which is why I go out of my way to never own a car with one of those colors. Of course by doing so I realize I'm making myself stand out to police, but I really like blue and purple cars. (edit: Lime green would be cool to have one day too. Ooh or a nice golden yellow.)