Porsche Hard Drives?

Hard disk vendor LaCie has announced a deal with Porsche Design GmbH whereby Porsche will design a new line of hard drive and CD/DVD_RW enclosures.

I hope this venture fails, so the trend dies out. In my opinion, external drives should be small, out of the way, and as functional as possible with as minimal form fuss as possible. A Porsche design is absurd and overkill. External hard drives are not meant to be admired. They're meant to store and retrieve data. I also suspect LaCie's going to have to charge a premium for the Porsche brand. How does that improve the value of the disk drive itself? It doesn't.

This reminds me of the silly industrial design of LinkSys cable routers and other home computer peripheral products. If the products must be visible at all, the only part of the product that needs to be visible is the array of LEDs. Nothing else matters or should matter. It's a shame that the cost of these goods has to include fancy injection-molded plastic designed by some ID-magazine-award-winner-wannabe. Grumble. Posted by brian at July 21, 2003 06:34 PM