Case design

Have you seen the new PowerMac from Apple? While the look of the thing is of dubious design quality, in my opinion, the one really truly outstanding feature has to be ease of use. Now most Macintosh users in my experience are the kind of people who'd rather that their Mac was a sealed unit that they could send off to someone "technical" if something went wrong, much like you or I might do with our video recorders. And yet, the case for the new G3 Mac is one of the best I've seen. It has carrying handles so you don't have to look like an American shopper when lugging it about (why don't American shopping bags have handles? Isn't that weird?), and best of all, all the components are easy to reach when you just tug the handle on the side of the machine.

Compare that to my A3000, which I open all the time. To start with, I have to find a space for my 17" monitor (okay, you'd have to do that with the G3 if it weren't a tower). Once I've done that, I would normally have to remove five screws (I don't have my machine screwed together since I open it all the time anyway), just to get the lid off. Once I've done that, if I want to get at the CPU, I'd have to unscrew my floppy and hard drives, unplug them from their leads, unscrew the cradle they sit on, unscrew the blanking plate bracket from the back of the machine, remove the ZorroIII daughtercard, unscrew the PSU, unplug it from the mainboard and then lift the cradle out. The you can get to the motherboard. I may have missed a step or two out here.

Now compare that experience to the G3 Mac, where to get at the CPU you just have to let the side panel down. There are no screws to undo, there are no bits to unplug (your CD-ROM/DVD, hard drive sit inside the machine. They aren't so easy to get at, but then they aren't much harder either). Simple. If you want to add memory, or plug in a card, you can just do so with this easy to open case. It makes me sick that some sap of a Mac user can do this, and probably won't, where I have to cut my fingers to ribbons opening my Amiga, which I do do!

I just hope that Amiga Inc. (not International, goddamit, Petro has nothing to do with the design of the new machine!), recognise this and design their new box accordingly. Having said that, if Amiga Inc (not International!) are going to follow their plan to the letter, they won't be designing anything apart from the spec of the computer, leaving actual manufacture to shadowy third parties yet to be named. I can only hope that they've looked at the PowerMac G3...