I'm suffering from Apple envy.
A few months ago, my friend Jen bought an iBook and has since sworn off PCs because her iBook not only works really well, but it's pretty.
You're not seeing things. It's pretty.
You think only a girl would care about this? Oh so wrong. Talk to any male graphic designer and he'll tell you the Macs win hands down for performance and they look great too. PCs? Bah, humbug!
I've been a PC user since about 1986 and between work and personal purchases, I've been through several different brands: Toshiba (wonderful laptops), Wang workstations and Dec, Dell, IBM, and HP networked PCs at work, Gateway, Compaq and Sony at home. I learned how to use a computer on a PC, right from the days of ASCII on up to Windows XP that I'm running now, so I'm pretty invested in both the platform and the software. My friend Laurie, however, has been a Mac girl from the get-go, and I've watched smugly as several of her Macs failed catastrophically and expensively, while my PCs only grew obsolete. And Macs have always been ridiculously, and in my case, prohibitively, expensive. They have, however, always looked cooler. Of all of the PCs I've worked on or owned, only my current Toshiba notebook and my current Sony VAIO begin to look halfway cool.
My notebook, an old Portege, is cool just by virtue of its size. It was one of the first subnotebooks and weighs only about 3 lbs. It's about the size of a hardback novel, but somewhat thinner. When I purchased it, I was torn between it and the early VAIO subnotebook. It just didn't look as sturdy as the Toshiba, but it was beautiful: a slim little case that looked almost like an overgrown ladies compact. You almost expected to see a mirror in the lid instead of a screen.
The VAIO desktop I'm working on now is a nice metallic blue-grey instead of the usual beige that gets so filthy so quickly thanks to static electricity and shows the dirt so wonderfully, like my keyboard does. It's a 14x8x14 tower and everything is behind a nifty little door, including the USB ports, so its a quasi-smooth surface. But it's still a box and it's till nothing special to look at. The only PC that I think can make any claim to interesting box design is Alienware's custom gaming PCs, which take their brand name literally.
This time around when I replaced my desktop system, I bought an NEC black flatscreen instead of the usual CRT monitor, so I've reduced some of the bulk of my system, but like my friend Jen, I'm fed up with stringing the 9,000 wires for peripherals and add-ons. I'm fed up, too, with having to buy furniture for my system. Used to be a typing table or credenza in addition to your desk would suffice. Now you need surfaces for your keyboard, monitor, printer and of course, the damn box. The box that is mostly empty air inside. Ever take the cover off? That's what you'll find. After all, they can squeeze the same amount of power, memory and drives into a laptop. Unfortunately, that makes them more expensive, for some reason. It's nice that the boxes are towers now, most of them, so at least the footprint is smaller, but it's still a bulky piece of equipment.
On top of that, they are all, almost without exception, ugly.
If you work on a PC, you might as well just leave it in the packing box. There's not much difference between the disign of the box it's shipped in and what's inside. In Gateway's case, the shipping box actually looks cooler than the PC box itself. At least the shipping box has that cute cowhide pattern on it.
PC makers are starting to get the idea. Dell, IBM, and HP have all come up with more compact models, but geeze, they're still butt-ugly. They're still boxes. They're not even cubes, like the Mac G4 issue that looked like a minature Borg spaceship. And what up with that HP? What is that? PC on a stick? At least they're black.
By contrast, check out the iMac:
It's cute! Way cute. It's white, like a marshamallow, not beige like, uh, I dunno. Mollusks? Talk about a color not found in nature. (Color! There's a start, people. At least color the damn box! Red! Blue! Puce! Anything but beige or black or grey. Even white is better.) Where it's not white, it's clear. It's articulated. It's got a tiny little footprint and not much mass. With its little round speakers, it could be a cousin of Herbie the Love Bug. Mac understands that the platonic solids and their subsets (cubes, hemispheres) are appealing. Rectangular boxes aren't.
But here's the Apple I'm having computer envy over: the G5 iMac. If you go wireless with it, there's no keyboard or mouse wires. No box. Peripherals run right from the back of your monitor. Now, I have a half-dozen USB ports on the stand of my monitor, and that helps, but this is a whole other thing. And it's no box on a stick. It's just a flat screen, 2 inches deep. Two inches! Gee, just like a notebook.
Can't we have a meeting of the minds here? Can't PC makers, who keep their prices affordable by licensing among multiple brands, buy a clue from exclusive Apple about design? Macs are so much more expensive and there's less software available for them, but people buy them at least as much because "they're pretty" as they do for the power and flexibility. Expand your market beyond geekboys! You want PCs to be ubiquitous? Make 'em a turbo-charged fashion accessory, like cell phones. Many of the people who buy Macs are graphic artists who understand and care about design, and this is no doubt part of Apple's strategy. This is one of the reasons the iPod's taken off. But if computers are so cool and futuristic, as PC makers have always touted, why don't most of them look it? Design-wise, they're as clunky as a Difference Engine and punch cards. Even kitchen appliances look cooler than most PCs (with the possible exception of Sony's VAIOs).
Listen up, IBM, HP, Gateway, Dell, et al. Hire yourself a couple of good German or Italian kitchenware designers. If they can package up a toaster to look fabulous, they can do wonders for your ugly, sharp-edged boxes. 
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