DaringFireball is making some interesting predictions about what'll happen at MacWorld in about 30 minutes, and this one caught my eye.

Good-bye, anodized Aluminum, hello something new that plays off the design cues of the new Mac OS X user interface mentioned above. The red/yellow/green/blue candy-colored transparent elements of Aqua resemble the hardware from the old G3 iMacs and Power Macs.

Recently I took my blue clamshell iBook to lunch to show someone a few interesting usenet posts in context. While we were using it in what was a slightly hoity toity place, a well-dressed, mid-to-high aged fellow walked over, assumed the "looking at a new car" pose, and said, "Is that the new Apple iBook?" I said, "No, it's from 1999 or so." With that, he turned and left, a little sheepishly, and without another word.

The point being is that the colorful design still works, still projects a positive image of Apple. After making the consumer part of the laptop line the blandest possible, like Jobs' shirts, now perhaps they will move back.

Personally, I think an updated clamshell would be a good idea. The retro-styling trend in automobiles is awfully popular, with Ford's Thunderbird and Mustang leading the charge, followed by Chevy's just announced Camero. Why not throw Intel innards and a nice screen into a clam, and send out a new retro book?

Imagine trying to find a worthy Gateway design for such a move.


PS -- I'm starting to wonder if Google is routinely called "such a great place to work" because it's ultimately a little lax. Ever since Google took over Blogger, and even moreso now that it's out of beta, I've been running into little dealbreaking issues, and have saved more than a handful of posts as text to post later, once the system is happy again.

I'm also not impressed with their willingness to discard the legacy Blogger interface. There's really no reason the BlogThis! feature needs me to know whether I'm on the new or old blogger, but here's the excuse I got when I tried to use it today.

The old version of Blogger is currently down for maintenance. We are also unable to create new accounts or blogs on Blogger at this time. Please try again later.

Nice. If the old version is down, at least route users using BlogThis! to the new version, if they've switched over, which I have.

I'm also surprised, honestly, that a Google system ever has downtime. Similar to my complaints about World of Warcraft going down every Tuesday, why can't these incredibly liquid companies have full, server-for-server replacement systems running while they run maintenance on the front line? Neither Google-Blogger nor Blizzard are hitting anywhere close to nine nines, even if we pretend the times I've seen them down are the only times without service. Imagine if their search engine did this (which seems to counteract my initial statement in this section, but I'm not so worried about Google continuing to do what it did well in the past, but the method by which it adds new features. How long before it's the equivalent of "Microsoft in a browser" in more than just market dominance?