Goodbye cuddly, time to harden up

The soft, contoured Mac laptops of old are gone.

What do you think of the new MacBook's looks? To me they look fine enough (and of course I would want one, if I wasn't still happy with my '07 MacBook Pro anyway) but it really does seem it's good bye to cuddly over at Apple design in Cupertino.

Once upon a time, Apple created towers that may have looked a bit slicker than the oppositions' but they were definitely professional-looking (that's techno-speak for 'boring'), while the consumer models (like the LC series) just looked like smaller versions of the professional machines.

But then Jobs came back to Apple and within a short time the so-called Jelly iMacs appeared (1998) with shiny, brightly-coloured translucent cases. The jelly iMacs that ended the CRT all-in-one line came in the variations Indigo, Flower Power and Blue Dalmation (2001).

These colourful iMacs certainly caught peoples' attention. They sold in droves, helping the renaissance of a company that had really hit the doldrums in the mid-1990s. The colours and translucence even made it into the towers for a while, and just to up the cuddly stakes, Apple followed the candy iMacs with a rounded, contoured and colourful laptop in 1999 - the iMac to go, in Steve Jobs' words.

This was great for students and certainly was eye catching; in orange, blueberry and lime they were almost day-glo. They were also really comfortable to carry under your arm when closed.

When the CRT iMacs were discontinued and the new iMac G4, with the little pod base, chrome arm and suspended LED monitor, may not have been the most practical shape ever invented but at least it was fun, the pod base was curved matte white and the machine was definitely instantly recognisable.

But when Apple's consumer laptop replacement came out in 2001, the fun clamshell shape and dramatic curves were gone. As compensation, the pure rectangular white plastic case at least had softly rounded corners, a design feature that continued through the Intel-based MacBook line.

You can check out the lineage here, at the Apple blogs at CNN.

Back on the desktop, when the G5/Intel iMac changed from plastic to aluminium earlier this year, all the fun went out of the case. Visually. I guess it's hard to make aluminium look fun or cuddly, but coupled to a thin keyboard and with the glossy black bezel surrounding the monitor, one has to imagine the fun was supposed to occur on the Mac itself. Not an unreasonable position, but when the aluminium iMac is switched off, it is nothing.

And now this has permeated the MacBook line. A hint may have been the 'special' black MacBook that shipped alongside the white ones of the previous generation. You could have a fun consumer MacBook, but you could also have a serious consumer Apple laptop.

After all, Apple is getting serious. Revenue is up, market share is up, and Microsoft and Dell and HP and all of those competitors are now seeing Apple as a genuine threat, rather than something to poke occasional fun at.

Those original iBook-toting students are out in the workforce and for those who are still studying, times are tough and the job market will be tough, too - your fun Mac laptop is now a very serious tool and boy, can you do some serious computing on it.

What do you think? Time for the third-parties to make curvy cuddly wrappers for 13.3-inch MacBooks, or is it time we all hardened up too?

 

- Mark Webster mac.nz