You can have any colour you want, so long as it is black*.
This is what Dell, the world's No 2 computer manufacturer, has been telling customers, after the launch of a range of colourful laptops was stymied by too much dust in the paint.
"Right now, TuxedoBlack is the only colour that is consistently meeting our quality standards," Alex Gruzen, a senior vice-president in Dell's consumer products group, wrote on the accident-prone company's blog.
"That's one reason why some customers are getting their orders before others."
Mr Gruzen wrote that there was "no problem painting hundreds at a time.
But as we increased the volume, otherwise manageable factors like dust contamination caused our successful yields to decrease".
The problem is the latest in a string of disasters at Dell, which has been forced in the past 18 months to fess-up to exploding laptop batteries, infuriating customer service, and a culture of fiddling the figures to meet financial targets.
And to cap it all, arch-rival Hewlett-Packard has soared past it in sales to take Dell's crown as the world's largest PC maker.
The colourful XPS M1330 and Inspiron laptops - available in vibrant blues, greens, yellows and pinks, were meant to spearhead a new sales push to regain lost market share, but the problems are causing delays slap in the middle of the back-to-school selling season.
The "pearl white" option has already been dropped.
The difficulties have been compounded by a shortage of parts used in screen manufacture.
* This line was originally attributed to the Model T Fords that rolled off Henry Ford's assembly line in the early 1900s.
