There has been a lot of chinwagging going on regarding the appearance of the latest iMac M1. Most people are warming up to the colors but are steadfastly disenchanted with the white bezels.

If you are as ancient as I am, you can recall the early days of the iMac and its brethren. No longer were we resigned to working with boring beige towers. We had casings that were (at least, initially) white around the front, including the portions around the screen. OMG – THEY WERE WHITE BEZELS!

Though my memory may be sketchy at best, I don’t recall a single complaint in any of the user groups I belonged to about the white bezels. In fact, the iMac was proclaimed to be the work horse for creatives, not serious computer afficiianados. Apparently, the white bezels didn’t perturb them whatsoever.

Fast forward to 2021 and everyone’s knickers are in a twist. OMG – WHITE BEZELS! No doubt there’ll be an all out revolution if the 32” iMacs carry on with the same theme.

In light of this, I have created a mock-up of what I feel would be the final touch to a completely retro look.

I present the Beige iMac M1. Does that bring back memories or does it not? I propose no changes to the guts. I want the silicon but no additional optical drives, particularly no (con)Fusion Drives. And emphatically NO circular mouse! Keep the Magic Trackpad, the Magic Mouse, my beloved Touch ID, and the mystical silicon.

No, we only had the single color that the first several generations of Mac users cut their teeth on. That was all we had before the advent of true color when the jelly beans appeared. They were something to behold.

The future was sitting on our desks, right in front of us. And it was stylish: housed in transparent shells of various hues that allowed us to stare at the internals in jaw-dropping wonderment. Surely this was all a dream…

So forgive me if I have a chuckle at the expense of those lumbered with this first-word problem. You carry in your pocket more computing power than we had in the days when beige towers ruled. You have all these possibilities at your disposal and yet your chief concern is the color of the bezels.

Oh to be young.

©2021 Frank Petrie