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Home▸ Forums▸ 68kMLA▸ Color Classic style family — #12
Post #12 by Mac128
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryHardware
Post DateFri, 6 Feb 2009 - 22:05
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/color-classic-style-family.16494/
Post
There are some Apple products that do not follow Apple's design languages at all. Many Apple monitors and printers were just re-badged PC products, such as the Performa Plus Display (re-badged Magnavox products).
I did not realize Apple continued this practice during the 90s, which was pretty common in the 70s & 80s before Apple had the resources to fully do it themselves. I knew they used other company's internals, but I thought from this point on they always custom designed the case. That Performa display is horrible. Perhaps I should have said any product Apple manufactured used Espresso. However it does not surprise me. Apple was struggling during this period and yet continued the practice of offering a full line of peripherals, regardless if they offered any improvement over third party offerings, if only to get a piece of the profit they would otherwise forfeit. By this time all manufactures pretty much used the same standards and many companies had begun to knock off both Apple's designs and colors, so basic monitors and printers could probably have been easily picked up rather than investing resources into creating them from scratch. This is also why Apple has likely gotten out of the printer business altogether. If you look at the Apple Store page today, they feature the third party printers that reflect their design style, not necessarily those that are most practical or affordable. Wireless and network printing also makes it easy to hide your printer well out of site.

There were also some other peripherals like a quicktake web-cam that was just a repackaged PC product, and I'm sure some hard drives and modems. But none of these products were designed or manufactured by Apple. So they feature somebody's design language, just NOT Apple's homegrown brand. Can you imagine Apple doing such a thing today?

mp.ls