One of the things I love about Atari is how their designs so obviously fit the time they were created.
These are my 800XL (top), 65XE (botom), and The400 mini (middle).
You can clearly see the design language jump from the 800XL to the 65XE, with the latter being obviously related to the 16 bit ST:
If you are not familiar with that tiny one, I wrote about it here. It is a modern emulated recreation from Retro Games:
Introducing The400! No, not a sci-fi series, but a modern mini recreation of the Atari 8-bit series.
This Mini, like others in the series, is a compact emulation of a classic computer. In this case the whole series of Atari's 8-bit computers, the 400, 800, XL, and XE machines, plus the 5200 and XE consoles.
Essentially the design is very close to the Atari 400 it mimics, and it emulates the other machines I feature in my photograph.
Even the original Atari, the 2600/VCS is a design classic, though. The first model featuring "wood" details, and later models being more 'space age' (even being nicknamed the Vader!).
It just seems by the mid 90s fewer and fewer companies were willing to make their designs really stand out? I am usually pretty fond of Sega but those two machines there (updated models to be fair) look really bland in comparison to their neighbours?
Hate it or hate it, at least the Cyber Truck looks different. Really, really bad, and the car itself is a laughing stock, but it is unique.
Apple really took some chances in the late 90s through the early 2000s starting with the original iMac. However, they eventually just stopped making any significant changes to the design. Their computers have looked essentially the same for like 20 years at this point. You would think companies could at least take a chance on "special edition" designs on a limited scale to try things out.
The candy macs were amazing 🤩