Apple's success can be measured not only in the improvement to its bottom line but in the number of would-be imitators, all of whom have been sent packing by the courts. It also has shattered once and
Apple's success can be measured not only in the improvement to its bottom line but in the number of would-be imitators, all of whom have been sent packing by the courts. It also has shattered once and for all the industry's fixation with the beige box.
While the beige box still exists it is no longer the only choice. Compaq offers interchangeable coloured facias with its 5000 and 7000 series and Gateway, NEC, IBM and Compaq all now offer small footprint models that take up even less desk space than the iMac.
These 'micro desktops' use laptop components including active matrix slim line TFT screens. Gateway's Profile, IBM's NetVista and NEC's PowerMate all incorporate the main motherboard, hard drive and CD drive in the pedestal that holds the flat screen, whereas Compaq's iPaq comes as a separate micro tower and free standing monitor.
Sales have been steady, if unspectacular. However, the machines are designed for the home office or the business executive who needs to conserve desk space. On average they take up about 25 per cent of the area as a standard tower-and-monitor PC does, but they also cost more and suffer the same performance limitations of a notebook computer, which makes them unappealing to many home users who want to play the latest games.
Despite that, the industry believes that this stylish micro desktop design will become commonplace in the home, as computing tasks are spread over several devices rather than the one study or office-based machine.
Industry leaders are pinning their hopes on devices called Internet appliances - bare bones computers designed specifically, and in many cases, solely for linking to the Internet. They save space by eliminating legacy equipment such as parallel and serial ports, replacing them with USB and eventually with wireless protocols such as Bluetooth.
Ideally from an industry perspective there will eventually be Internet appliances in several rooms of the house - some of them permanently connected to a single Web site or portal. For example a kitchen appliance may provide a 24-hour a day, seven-day-a-week connection to the local supermarket.
This has industrial designers working to come up with stylish designs that will blend with the decor of the room the appliance is expected to be in. Not only do they have to tackle the design problems of the core appliance, other designers have to look at how to match peripherals such as printers.
As Gilles Klein of Elle puts it so succinctly in his French accent, 'Printers are ugly'.