Imacs Look - And Sell - Like Candy Apple Riding Resurgence Of Radical New Design

“Delicious.”

Hardly a word used to describe a computer. But that’s the adjective Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs blurted out last week as he unwrapped the five candy-colored iMacs during his flashy MacWorld Expo keynote speech at the Moscone Convention Center.

The colors - blueberry, grape, tangerine, lime and strawberry - are the latest incarnations of the top-selling ocean teal iMac, which debuted Aug. 15.

Aaron Betsky, curator of architecture, design and digital products at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, said: “We have to recognize that design saved Apple. It was to Steve Jobs’ credit that he knew he had only one card left to play - design - and it was an important card.”

According to Apple, the Cupertino computer maker has shipped 800,000 of the futuristic iMacs, which look like something out of the Jetson’s home. Those sales figures make the iMac the country’s best-selling PC model.

After years of playing it safe, the iMac’s sales figures have convinced the computer industry that now is the time to finally break free from the beige, sheet-metal boxes that have squatted on desktops for years.

The iMac, said Paul Otellini, an executive vice president at Intel, “is a great wake-up call for the industry.”

According to Otellini, the iMac has shown that as home computers begin to become indistinguishable in price and performance, it will be the outer skins that can make a difference in a customer’s choice.

Otellini said unnamed major computer makers had recently shown him some upcoming innovative designs that would change the desktop landscape.

Intel has already designed several prototypes of metallic-colored pyramid shaped computers, with the hopes of creating a consumer design movement in the home computer industry, the better to spur sales of Intel microprocessors.

The arrival of good-looking computers is long overdue, said Hartmut Esslinger, CEO of Frog Design, a Sunnyvale-based design firm that has done design for Apple, IBM, Compaq and other computer manufacturers.

“It’s so horrible that this industry became so degraded by conservatism with shortsighted, boring designs,” said Esslinger, a renowned industrial designer. “This is a shame. This is a scandal.”

Esslinger, whose company is designing the next generation of Windows-based machines for Micron Technology Inc., Vadem Inc. and Packard-Bell NEC, Inc., said that the ubiquitous beige computer box was a design dictated by the technicians stuffing microchips and hard drives into them.

Of eye-appealing, design-driven PCs, SFMOMA’s Betsky said, “Having an object like that is important like having a new kitchen appliance or having a pet is important. It makes you feel as though you can have an emotional relationship with it.”

Then there’s the color. While desktop computer makers have in the past experimented with emerald, blue, black and other hues, they’ve always reverted back to the same putty color.

Esslinger said the color served an ergonomic purpose by keeping contrasts down in an office environment. “Too much contrast, it damages the eye.”