Nostalgia

Just commit a minute drug offense in the USA, and you can experience transparent electronics again.

Though, with the caveat that the computer stuff is integrated with the CRT which stores a potentially deadly high voltage for quite a while after being unplugged. Which doesn't mean it's not repairable, it certainly is especially by an independent shop with trained technicians, but it was still very clearly not meant to be repaired by the user with no prior experience. IIRC there were older Macs with integrated monitors that had the computer parts more or less separated from the monitor parts, which were comparatively safer.

Mind you, this carried over to fairly recent iMac models, because up until the M1 iMacs, they had their power supply as just a bare PCB right beside the motherboard with no separate enclosure, and modern switched mode power supplies also have capacitors that store deadly voltages long after being unplugged (as in, higher voltages than from the wall, they step up the voltage before stepping it back down which allows them to use more energy efficient components). While there's a lot to dislike about discrete power adapters for everything, they are definitively safer especially for people doing repairs because all the dangerous high voltage stuff is self-contained and separate from the actual device itself (and allows you to very easily replace the power supply with zero disassembly).

it was also almost 8 years ago already.

Funtastic Grape you philistine

I think that is more a problem that you need to clean up your room more and properly dispose of your candy wrappers. Gross.

I hold a grudge against the translucent plastic fad.

Once upon a time the Linux workstation at my desk at $CHIP_COMPANY was built into a noname transparent teal ATX case. For that reason I gave it the hostname "fugly".

We had excessive field failures with some of our chips, and I was tasked with coming up with a way to identify those bad parts at customer sites. My solution was a bootable Linux CD that would run a test and tell the customer if they need to contact us for a recall. The test relied on a modified Linux kernel, so it couldn't be distributed as an application. I used "fugly" to develop and build the test, patched kernel, and CD image.

The test was deployed, the first few customers were pleased, and I got a wood plaque and bonus for my efforts.

A few weeks later, my manager called me into her office looking uncharacteristically pissed off. She asked why I put a message saying "fugly" into the CD. A customer complained about it, saying they saw "fugly" on the screen when the test was running, and while it did it's job it was unprofessional. A split second of confusion before I realized what happened: at boot time the Linux kernel prints the name of the machine it was compiled on, in this case fugly.team.company.com . It scrolls past quickly on boot, so neither I nor my collaborators ever noticed. Somehow the customer latched onto it.

I ended up with a slap on the wrist, being put on PIP for 6 months and having to change the hostname because higher-ups needed their pound of flesh.

Coincidentally, a week after this incident, Toyota posted a billboard at a major intersection near our office advertising the Scion xB that read "Funky? Or Fugly?".

I agree with you, except for the atomic purple Gameboy Color. That was the shit

Oh no, do I need ANOTHER 8bitdo controller...?

I'm strongly considering it now...

I mean, the items in this post were definitely made that way for marketing. The color of the plastic doesn't change the functionality at all but it often was more expensive to get the special colors, or only limited quantities were produced. "Special editions" is a tried and true marketing tactic that goes back much further than the 90s.

How has color ever been used for anything other than trying to make your product look more appealing?