I have to say, I love the industrial design of these 80s machines from Atari, and also from contemporary Commodore offerings. As an example, the original Amiga 1000 is beautiful, and I'd be incredibly happy to have a machine with that form factor, but equipped with modern internals, today.
Honestly, I don't think even Apple could touch the best of Atari and Commodore industrial design in the back half of the 1980s. To be blunt, the early Macintoshs simply weren't practical in their design: for starters, a tiny monitor - that was originally black and white (which in 1984 was already kind of a joke) - and very limited upgradeability, relatively poor multimedia capabilities (speech synthesis was no more than a gimmick that was also available on other platforms), and then the whole aesthetic just wasn't that pleasant.
And I say this as someone who, personally, has only owned Apple machines for the past 15ish years, so I'm not exactly coming at this from a "not a fanboi" perspective. I'd still take 1980s Atari or Commodore aesthetic over modern Apple, or modern anything else for that matter[0].
Also, as an aside, I really enjoyed seeing "Atari Means Business with the Mega ST" as the top headline on Hacker News in 2025. Even on a Sunday when content typically tends to be more varied and interesting this was still an entertaining surprise.
[0] I suspect the reality may be that I'm an "anything but Wintel" kind of person, although not at any cost, because I did run PCs exclusively for 11 or 12 years. They never really helped me enjoy computing in the way the other machines have though.
The industrial design of PCd may have been lacking in beauty, but it was almost always practical.
For example: I cannot think of any desktop models that lacked internal expansion. They may have used a riser card to stack in two or three slots sideways, but the slots were there. The design may have been crude, but at least your desktop wasn't turned into a disaster every time the technological landscape shifted: when hard drives became affordable, the world switched to 3.5" floppies, if you decided to use online services or send faxes directly from your computer, get a CD-ROM, or cable Internet.
Honestly, I don't think even Apple could touch the best of Atari and Commodore industrial design in the back half of the 1980s. To be blunt, the early Macintoshs simply weren't practical in their design: for starters, a tiny monitor - that was originally black and white (which in 1984 was already kind of a joke) - and very limited upgradeability, relatively poor multimedia capabilities (speech synthesis was no more than a gimmick that was also available on other platforms), and then the whole aesthetic just wasn't that pleasant.
And I say this as someone who, personally, has only owned Apple machines for the past 15ish years, so I'm not exactly coming at this from a "not a fanboi" perspective. I'd still take 1980s Atari or Commodore aesthetic over modern Apple, or modern anything else for that matter[0].
Also, as an aside, I really enjoyed seeing "Atari Means Business with the Mega ST" as the top headline on Hacker News in 2025. Even on a Sunday when content typically tends to be more varied and interesting this was still an entertaining surprise.
[0] I suspect the reality may be that I'm an "anything but Wintel" kind of person, although not at any cost, because I did run PCs exclusively for 11 or 12 years. They never really helped me enjoy computing in the way the other machines have though.