>>18499610
>that really seems to be the inflection point for when consumer electronics in the west started to go way down hill aesthetically
So it's lacking in soul? Like nearly everything else. I was mocked for pointing this out weeks ago, but it's just a trend across all corporate design. You're noticing the cycle just as it may be hitting a wall in the tech sector, but it's been repeating everywhere since the industrial revolution. The techno-capital cycle is one of innovation and consolidation. You see the most creativity show through when active innovation and competition is constantly occurring and designers/corporations feel a need to distinguish their products from each other. After that things nearly always consolidate into the most efficient soulless version of whatever has been developed.
Stuff like
>>18499782
is just impractical from a corporate design perspective today. The technical limitations guided the design, so the tech itself has driven us away from interesting design opportunities. What does a contemporary version of this turn into? There would be no CRT, no visible on-monitor speaker, no knobs or buttons, so what's really left? How might modern manufacturers take inspiration from these designs? Retro tech has caught up with furniture design in that people are more interested in collecting things that had soulful design than anything new. But again, the tech itself is outdated, whereas a vintage chair still functions as well as any other. AFAIK there is a market for new CRT's, but it's not enough to get anything new off the ground. The manufacturing base is gone. It's the fucking moon landing all over again and Apple is SpaceX. The major corporations have secured effective monopolies and the only thing we have to look forward to is more consolidation and a landscape of products that either push just how soulless and minimal they can be or new designs that LARP as old designs like a bad Hollywood reboot. It's not looking good, in other words.