The death of industrial design and the era of dull electronics
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
If anything, so much design (and not just industrial) seems boring today because everything seems to converge to the "optimal" design much faster. Cars had all these wacky designs in the 50s and 60s because we hadn't yet optimized for things like aerodynamics. When I first saw the "modern farmhouse" housing design in my city, I thought "that looks nice" - now it makes me gag because I see them everywhere, with insane prices to boot.
The Internet has caused, in many ways, a reduction of individual markets and "winner take all" economics, and that includes design. Much has already been written about how many logos all look the same now, e.g. https://www.sublimio.com/why-are-all-fashion-logos-becoming-...
However, with cars I think that doesn’t hold. Cars don't need to disappears into the background. Yet every car is converging on an unholy child of a minivan and a small crossover SUV. They are all the same and they are all equally ugly. Sacrificing a bit of aerodynamics for any level of personality would be a welcome shakeup.
I think it was the same in the 50s and 60s, just that the then car manufacturers hadn’t figured out how to compete in the other more important aspects as effectively.
Proof: look at a 1970 'Cuda. Tell me you wouldn't buy it in an instant if you had the cash!
https://www.classicautomall.com/vehicles/264/1970-plymouth-a...
Have fun with your jellybean! (Sorry)
In any case, the '67 and '68 Mustangs are the best looking of the Mustang line, and the '68 Dodge Charger is to die for.
If you cannot tell the difference, may I suggest you spend a wonderful evening watching "Bullitt".
When I was in high school, a friend of mine bought a '67 Mustang for $200, so of course he offered me a ride. I had never ridden in one before. I barely had the door closed when he stomped on the gas. What can I say, it was a transformative experience! I soon acquired one for myself. Converted it to a 4-speed, hopped up the engine, and had a grand time with it for years until a garbage truck turned it into an accordion.
I still miss that car.
But I did wind up replacing it with a 72 Dodge Challenger, which is close to being a Cuda. I spent a lot of money on its engine in the machine shop. I enjoy every second driving it, and giving friends rides in it.
Like me before I got the ride in the Mustang, you gotta get a ride in one before you dis it.
I'd still rather have my 20-year-old 350Z.
It has heated seats, heated steering wheel, AC, backing camera/sensors, uses electricity which means it costs practically nothing to drive, doesn't make noise, isn't hard to get going in an uphill, and probably about 100 other advantages.
It's very possible to make highly aerodynamic sedan, hatch and SUVs. Drag coefficients are available for most cars.
A bigger difference is detailing: things like mirrors make a huge difference.
So at least in some ways, I want them more the same, not less. I live in an area where Waymo is common so I see self driving cars all the time. In other words, unlike people not in an area like this, I have actual experience with them working and working well. As soon as they are available for purchase I will buy one. Ideally one with no controls. No steering wheel, no accelerator, no brake peddle, no turn signal. At which point, I suspect, like phones, they may get even more alike. All that stuff is un-needed in a level 5 self-driving car
I'm sure someone is going to respond such stuff will be needed for emergencies or whatever. I think that middle stage will only last 5-10 years and then they'll take out the manual controls. They took out manual controls from elevators 70 years ago. They're taking out almost all controls now. IIRC Toyota already has such vehicles. I know Honda showed of designs years ago. They're a platform that carries a box. The box can be a cargo box, a food truck box, a 12 person passenger box, more comfy 6 person box. No driver's seat.
Because it's a local maximum of utility. Most people don't care that their car "lacks personality" or "looks ugly to auto enthusiasts" - they just want it to be safe, efficient, and capable. Crossover-type vehicles generally get you the best combination of the three.
Blending in feels much safer these days. Much like herd animal behavior.
After 2 or 3 years he had enough of „hey I saw you passing by can you do small thing for us while you’re around”.
I think he also went with as generic looking car as possible after that.
Closing in on 40 I couldn’t care less. If it is safe, doesn’t break down, gets me to places I am happy.
I have my own ways to express myself as a person, car is definitely not the thing.
I'm not interested in wasting tens of thousands of dollars on slightly more comfortable seats and stuff like that. I could, it just doesn't seem worth it. I'd rather have the money for other things.
Maybe next time I'll buy a slightly more premium car like a Volvo EC30 or something like that, if I can find a nice used one for a decent price. I don't see any reason to buy new cars. In my market a 4 year old car (still under warranty) is literally less than half the price of a new one. I don't think the warranty is worth that much.
I beg to differ. They may be safer and more efficient, but they get those advantages by trading off cargo and passenger space. A crossover can carry a heck of a lot more than a sedan and still fit 5 people - hence why it's the "local maximum."
If pockets of humanity could isolate themselves from the rest, we could get diversity growing again, that one sentinel island might be our only hope.
You cannot even tell if a car is a Ferrari these days, unless you can see the badge.
Strange then that everyone around me is driving some kind of high fronted armoured car
This seems like excessive hyperbole, I can reliably tell apart every marque on the road in my country by lights and grille shape.
https://www.gtrent.com/upload/images/modelli/ferrari/sf90_sp...
Then there's this one:
The Ferrari 308 was released in 1975, and it's recognizably similar to the SF90, aside from its side air scoop. Compare to the Corvette Stingray from the same year, which has that classic "we don't really do design but it's got a V8" Detroit look.
I'm not saying emissions standards haven't had an effect, but there have been other forces changing the styling of cars as well. If anything, some body shapes like Corvette's for example have become more interesting in recent years - the blocky rear end from the 80s and 90s was replaced by something that actually has curves.
Everything from machine tools to appliances and housing has much less decoration now that it used to. Industrial stuff is all very clean and tidy in painted cubes and blocks of flats and houses are very shipshape and AirBnB fashion, but there's no heart in a lot of it.
Part of it is manufacturing techniques - when you had hand made features and hand-sculpted cast components, there's an innate organic nature. With modern CAD/CAM and materials handling, sheet, slab and bar is often the order of the day, and even plastic mouldings tend towards utilitarian. High end stuff can still get a nice-looking casting, but it's a premium value-add, whereas previously the whole unit was premium. Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded.
And yes, things are far cheaper in many ways (housing excepted), so it's not all bad news, but it's just very sterile.
Which is a shame because I'm fairly sure that nearly everyone except for some die-hard Brutalists and float glass manufacturers actually love pretty buildings and even originally mildly interesting buildings become tourist attractions among the glass slabs and cubes today.
That actually started way sooner than in the 60s. For a good starting point see the 1910 essay Ornament and Crime from Adolf Loos, but even that was a bit after the cultural change already started, though before it was widely applied.
Well, I live in a house built in the Victorian era and I love my cornices and architraves decorated with classical shapes that go back to antiquity—astragals, cavettos and such—and my cedar doors, panelling, window sills, skirting boards again all shaped with classical mouldings—ogees, coves, ovolos, cymae, scotias, beadings, etc mostly together in various architecturally-pleasing combinations. And, yes, my house even has a finial on top.
These days, it's unfortunate that many of us never give much consideration to or take time to even look at these decorative shapes let alone examine them carefully. Shame really, as they aren't just fleeting fashion from the bygone Victorian era but are wonderful geometric shapes and curves that have stood the test of time, in fact they've been appreciated for at least several thousand years.
"Oddly, it's never been cheaper in labour to get a plaster decoration made, but you can hardly get them, whereas they were sold in catalogues by the ton when they were carefully hand-moulded."
I don't consider my house to be exceptional by any stretch but still it's an ongoing testament to both good design and to the excellent skills of craftsmen who built it. That build quality is just not available today despite builders and carpenters having excellent timesaving tools not available in yesteryears.
Moreover, those classical geometric curves cut into the woodwork in my house weren't done with modern machinery (say a spindle moulder) but planed by hand with either a wooden hand plane or a combination plane like the Stanley No. 45†, and cutting mouldings this way is difficult and requires considerable skill (I know, I've had to do it when making repairs).
Unfortunately, as you've mentioned, modern CAD/CAM and other industrial tech has made manufacturing easier than ever and yet design (and often quality) have almost hit rock bottom. Whether it's building houses or computers and or any numbers of things, design is almost nonexistent; or little or no thought has been given to the ergonomics of how products are used (I'm continually whingeing on HN about the terrible ergonomics of much software produced these days).
These aren't isolated cases, recently on separate occasions I've purchased cargo-type work pants (different brands) and the special smartphone pockets in both aren't deep enough to do the zipper up, my normal sized phone protrudes about a cm above the zipper (it's a great feature to prevent phone loss but totally useless if it can't be zipped). How the fuck can something as obvious as that happen?
I've come to the conclusion it's a combination of manufacturers maximizing profit and the fact that too few complain, a general drop in aesthetic appreciation across society and our disposable throwaway culture: "who cares if it doesn't look good or it's buggy, we'll be chucking it out in a year or so anyway."
_
† I own a Stanley No. 45, if look carefully in these links you'll see numbers of its plane irons have curved cutting surfaces that conform to the geometry of those curves. https://www.carters.com.au/index.cfm/index/9072-woodworking-...
https://www.jimbodetools.com/products/complete-set-of-22-cut...
Modern CAD tools have been horrible at "fiddly" ornamentation for decades compared to a hand drawn decoration. There was once an article about this but I can't find it now.
And then when architects spend careers building cubes and angular slab-sided and regular shapes they don't train their apprentices and juniors to be able to conceive, specify and draw a pleasing ogee and a proportional scrollwork around a window.
And there's definitely an element of can't-be-arsed about things. Riffing on your clothing example, I have an, IMO, outrageously expensive designer hoodie I was once given. It quickly failed because the kangaroo pouch was just sewn onto the single-layer front with no backing to reinforce the corner. Instant hole. Though there's some element of survivor bias there, as all the real shit from the 1920s fell apart immediately too, so it's not that everything was great.
It is a shame that this is true, because I have never loved any slab-of-glass phone the way I loved my old BlackBerries. I just can't type properly without physical feedback; I'm constantly making and correcting typos, all slow and awkward. The phone no longer feels like a tool ought to feel: an extension of myself into the world - it's just some gadget I'm obligated to carry around and put up with.
He painstakingly erases every mistyped letter along the way and demand precision that is impossible given the constraints.
When I type on a phone keyboard, it is a tool for communicating, not for typing, and I type word-wise instead of letter-wise and use the autocorrect/correction bar liberally. I'll do maybe one or two more manual edits when I am fully done typing. I tried to get him to try this approach and he just couldn't do it. He needed every letter to be the one he meant to hit.
When I need to type something I know autocorrect will screw up, or I am typing a URL or something it won't get right, I slow down dramatically and type like they do. Not quite swiping, but holding my finger longer to see the pop-up.
Not sure if it is a worldview thing, a way the brain works thing, or something else, but it has been a long ongoing conversation between me and him about the different ways we use computer and computer adjacent devices - I'm more than happy with search-centric interfaces, he hates them and needs manual organization, etc. This carries over to AI where I perceive it as a partner in completing a task, he sees it as an unreliable and unruly tool that won't follow his precise instructions.
This likely compounds: when some task will be an order of magnitude easier if I wait to do it on a computer, I'm unlikely to bother attempting it on a phone, so I likely never spend enough time trying to write on a phone to develop fluency with its interface.
I never use autocorrect or any sort of typing-assistance features, on the phone or anywhere else. All the flashing and zooming is unbearably distracting, and the machine guesses wrong often enough that it feels like more hindrance than help.
I have not yet spent enough time playing with AI tools to have developed much of an opinion about them, but I can easily imagine why your friend might feel that way - I, too, have very little patience for unruly tools! If I have to think about the tool, and manage it, and can't just wield it as an extension of my mind, it usually feels better to just do the work by hand, even if that would take longer.
We are both touch typists, I actually don't know how I would type on a phone keyboard quickly while looking at the letters. I don't, I look at the words to see if they correct the way I want them to.
> I never use autocorrect or any sort of typing-assistance features, on the phone or anywhere else.
Yeah, that pretty much makes touchscreen keyboards useless. It is a fundamental part of their design IMO. Like trying to use a stand mixer to make bread but cranking it manually instead of using the motor because you can't feel the dough.
If it’s a fundamental part of their design, then why does it suck so hard?
Autocorrect/complete features may well be a fundamental part of the intended usage, but they make the experience substantially worse for me. It takes less work and causes less frustration to simply fix my typos than it would to battle with an obstreperous moron robot which thinks it knows what I am trying to say better than I do.
Oh and it's even worse than that if the keyboard is set to support more than one language, where autocorrect will just do whatever it wants.
In the end I just turned autocorrect off on my phone.
The correction bar is a bit better, but it likes to reorder words and often lags even on my new iPhone 17PM.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-...
Previously, personal computers in the home were something of a novelty that didn't necessarily have a ton of value or that value was still being discovered. And now we see that the content that is displayed on the digital screen is most of the value, and so akin to many Hollywood sci-fi takes, where the screen becomes just a piece of glass, modern technology is moving in that direction.
The device itself is not the point, but the content that the device enables access to is.
But these have always been mass-produced consumer devices. Even if you prefer the aesthetics of the original iMac to today's iMac, and even to the extent that corporate greed has arguably gotten worse, your relationship to Apple is the same either way--when you buy their products, you make them a lot of money.
I don’t object to making companies a lot of money, so long as what I get is worthwhile.
The thing I'm referring to is an attitude I've seen in TFA and elsewhere, although in the TFA it seems somewhat implied, where people conflate their preference or nostalgia for old products with a belief that the market behind those older products was any less cold and detached than the market for today's products. I don't know if I'm articulating it well, and there's additional context that's hard to surface here, but it's like this idea of "culture and design today suck because they're dictated by a handful of corporations; things were better <x> years ago when we had a different flavor of culture and design dictated by the same handful of corporations!"
IDK. It just gives me a yucky feeling when a presumably anti-conformist, maybe even anti-capitalist rejection of modern design goes on to, in the same breath, prop up the Sony Walkman(TM) as a rich cultural artifact from a better era. The antidote to our corporate overlords shouldn't be a time machine to revive an earlier version of those same corporate overlords.
The nostalgia is for a time when a new product could genuinely surprise you.
Now that we look at the designs from 20-30 years ago, they stand out simply because they're outdated. In another 20-30 years, someone will write an article about the beauty of "glass slab" phones of the 2020s.
We also tend to cherry-pick outliers. You can find some beautiful designs in every decade, but they're not necessarily representative of everyday life. There's a modern-day company making portable cassette players that look like this:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MfFjHvcZjFzZLRPa4p7QZm-970...
Striking and prize-worthy, but not how we roll.
Aside from that, the trend in tech always been functional geometric modernism - predominantly black, white, grey, and beige, with occasional very controlled splash colours, predominantly straight lines, rectangles, circles, and simple curves, predominantly an implied or explicit grid.
It doesn't matter if you're looking at cars, synths, computers, offices, or cafes - it's all the same design language. Organic elements in spaces are limited to wood panelling (for status, as always) and verrrry occasionally some tame plants or trees.
There are no organic or chaotic elements in mainstream industrial design. Everything is very carefully controlled, sometimes literally down to the last micron.
As a hardware founder, who takes great pride in our industrial design and how we've made the thinnest, and most sleek EEG ever, we wanted the device to basically disappear. Nobody wants to wear an EEG headband, it isn't what they are buying. They are buying the neurostimulation that provides better sleep.
On the other hand, our industrial engineer wanted our headband to look just like a headband. It would be completely enclosed in fabric.
I wanted it to be appealing visually, not look "weird" but also, remind the user that there was magic inside. This is one of the reasons we left a bit of the electronics poking out the back and that element has a bit of ornamentation to it. (https://affectablesleep.com).
I have a folding phone. It isn't devoid of design. The design makes it function.
I think the article is confusing ornamentation with industrial design.
My laptop (Asus something) has a ceramic something finish with some etching on it. That's ornamentation. It's feel. Same with the speaker grill holes, they have some design to them.
Is it dull? It certainly isn't ground breaking. But it's pleasing, and it gets out of the way. But how much ornamentation do I want?
Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.
The TV example in the post doesn't really explain that we needed to have these plastic gray cases for TVs with speakers and buttons. But why was that a better look than just a screen?
To my eyes, those old TVs are ugly. But I remember when Sony brought out an interface where the channel showed up on the screen and had faded away after displaying the number, and I was blown away at how beautiful the interface was.
Additionally, my Kindle Scribe is a pretty boring slab, but I've tried buying nice pens to go with it. I don't think the Lamy (which I currently have) is a beautiful design, but it is better than the pen that comes with the device, which is devoid of any emotion.
As we move to glasses interfaces, I think we'll see a new heyday of electronics design.
Everyone up and down the socioeconomic ladder in the US uses Apple devices, and you can buy them at Walmart and Costco for less than $1,000. If someone is assuming “status” from seeing an Apple product, that seems to be a mistake by the observer.
e.g., in most Asian and African countries, Apple is considered as a luxury brand.
Of course, the Apple fanboys will be quick to compare it to Samsung and other companies who also sell $1000+ premium phones.
But all those companies also sell budget phones that are very affordable. It's only Apple that refuses to sell budget phones. In fact, even Apple's cheapest phones (SE models) are unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.
So yeah, when most people look at Apple products, they do assume their buyer to be "prestige status" (one who prefers luxury good/product).
It is also why Apple refuses to bundle chargers and cables (or at least, it tried to do so, until EU forced it to bundle them; but Apple does such cheapskate shenanigans in the other continents, where pro-consumer watchdogs/laws are lax), because it knows its fans will buy whatever it sells at whatever price points it sells even if basic accessories are not bundled. Unfortunately, Samsung and other companies are also following suit on such evil (anti-consumer) tactics.
Apple is also notorious for making it very hard for customers/third-parties to repair its products. This is why EU had to enforce its Right to Repair law on Apple stringently, and EU also forced Apple to give USB Type-C charging port (instead of Lighting port) on its devices which other manufacturers were doing so since years.
TLDR: Companies can act evil only if we let them get away with their evil ways.
You got this backwards, the EU is who has been pushing for the un-bundling of chargers. That was the whole reason for their push towards universal USB/USB-C adoption - so you could buy a new phone and keep using your old cable and charger, for environmental reasons.
This is also quite explicit in the EU law - it literally requires sellers to offer buying a device without the charger if you don't need one
> Directive (EU) 2022/2380, Article 3a
> Where an economic operator offers to consumers and other end-users the possibility to acquire the radio equipment referred to in Article 3(4) together with a charging device, the economic operator shall also offer the consumers and other end-users the possibility of acquiring that radio equipment without any charging device.
The only country that requires Apple to bundle a charger is Brazil.
90% of everything most Americans buy is unaffordable for daily wage earners in many nations of the world.
If I live in America (or a similarly developed country), then that definition of "prestige" is useless.
This is a sad statement about the world in general, and USA in particular unfortunately.
And the rich vs poor inequality gap has widened drastically.
There was an Oxfam report that the world’s top 1% richest elites own more wealth than 95% of humanity.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-top-1-own-mor...
During the pandemic, the world's billionaires became 54% richer, while the poor became poorer.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/billionaire-wealth-covid-pandem...
During the first 2 years of the pandemic, the top 10 richest men doubled their fortunes, while incomes of 99% of humanity fell.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-doub...
There is also the "I have Apple, I'm creative". "I have Apple, I'm cooler than Android".
I don't know if the blue/green bubble thing is about socioeconomic differences, or if it's just about "you're not as good as I am".
If you're so sure Apple doesn't have a status feature, then what's the whole green/blue bubble about?
Also, international MMS costs money, while iMessage is free regardless of location.
Interesting coincidence how the peak was achieved right when most of the audience would have been children or young adults, and therefore a time they're likely to be nostalgic for.
Talking about TVs the article goes all the way back to 2007, and not the console TVs which were actual wooden pieces of furniture with scope for artistry in the enclosure, not just "industrial design" or "Frutiger Aero" or some other buzzword.
Though I think there's another perspective to entertain here that isn't just about the industrial design style of the phone or display. Instead, think about how many discrete products general computing devices have subsumed. The disappointment comes across to me less that a slab is consumer computers dominate form, it's that the slab has made the rest of environment more sparse and now a slab is the sole focus point.
Even desktop computers such as the Framework Desktop. [0]
Plus there's still Teenage Engineering if you want things that look nice when powered off :)
The real question is why don’t more mainstream electronics look as creative as teenage engineering?
The kind of designs that (e.g.) Sony was selling on the scale of millions in the early 2000s were incredibly unique and eye-catching.
Sony S2 Sports WM-FS566
Sony Sports Walkman D-SJ01 Portable CD Player
Just to name a couple.
A device which just provides a blank screen for the software to take over can perform the task of many single purpose gadgets, often even better. It just isn't as fun.
For something I handle hundreds of times a day, I want it to be unobtrusive — free from design gimmicks or unnecessary distractions.
In that sense, the “Cambrian Explosion” of early smartphone designs has undergone its own form of natural selection — a Cambrian decimation that left only the most functional forms to survive.
Upon reading (or rather, listening to) Neuromancer again, I get the feeling that the original "cyberspace deck" envisioned by Gibson was a plain, rectilinear device not at all like the greeble-encrusted gadgets you find on r/cyberdeck. It's very sparsely described, but we do know it has a built-in keyboard, "trodes" for the brain-computer interface to serve as a display, and with all this talk of "ROM constructs" and "slotting in" it accepts software via cartridge. In short—it probably resembled a 1980s home computer, like a TI-99/4A or an Atari 800XL. Gibson's technological world in his early cyberpunk works is very much informed by a cursory examination of the tech of the day, combined with a lot of imagination and guesswork.
Modern cyberdecks draw much more inspiration from all the cyberpunk stuff that emerged after Neuromancer: movies like Strange Days and The Matrix; video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Shin Megami Tensei, and even Wipeout; and anime like Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which provide glimpses into a world in which technology might have evolved, visually and ergonomically, in a different direction from what it did. I find this sort of technofetishism fascinating for its role as a sort of roleplay of an imaginative alternate universe where modern-era tech was still cool and fun. A specific subgenre of this is the Amiga enthusiast community, where people soup up old Amiga hardware with modern, very expensive FPGA-based addons (the nearest a solo hobbyist can get to modern "custom chips") in an effort to show what computing might be like had Commodore not failed.
I don't think you can have a world where mass-market technology looks like that, because why would it? Engineers with time, resources and technology would do what they do now - design for manufacturability and mass-market appeal.
There are some really cool devices that split the difference between cyberdecks and mass-market devices; the MNT Reform and DevTerm come to mind. Sweet-looking as they are, they don't veer too far from standard laptop ergonomics, the DevTerm choosing to emulate those of the popular Tandy 100 series of portable computers.
You pay a premium for mid-century furniture. Even reproductions. Some furniture of that era never stopped production because the design keeps it in demand.
There will always be a market for bland IKEA/Target/whatever. But not everyone wants to sit on a log like a caveman.
Even looking just at phones, Nothing is doing interesting things.
But looking more broadly, some categories that have interesting design work going on:
Synthesizers & other electronic music devices: Arturia (minifreak and microfreak) and Teenage Engineering are quite well known but there are lots of interesting smaller players
Headphones: Design has become quite a differentiator - things like the B&W PX8s and the Apple AirPod Max have their own interesting design languages
Coffee machines: Everything from interesting pod machine designs to things like Rocket Espresso machines all have distinct designs.
Non information products still have a variety of design forms. People say cars are bland but a Mini, Ferrari F80, F150 pickup, Range Rover etc have pretty different forms.
There are still weirdly shaped phones sold today (Unihertz, for example) and strange-looking music players for the home. They are not selling well because nobody wants them.
Their take on monitors that aren't just the typical black plastic office-aesthetic slabs. I like what they've done with it, and personally would have been interested but this is 27" 4k and I can't downgrade from 5k (converted an old imac to work as an external display and I love it!)
So, like most things, It seems like Industrial Design is alive and well, just not from the big dominant players; and isn't that what you would expect? Wouldn't you expect you'd be celebrating smaller indy shops than the big monopolies?
But, for some reason these small shops have become so anonymized that they're out of our collective consciousness, and I think there's truth to this, the problem in a sense isn't that industrial design is dead, or there are no interesting electronics, but there are in fact too many players making interesting electronics, and there's no "middle class" anymore.
TV's and smartphones are an interesting place to start though, I'd generally say that TV's and Smart Phones have improved by just being a big screen. Cars seem to me like a better example, where it feels like even companies that used to pride themselves as being different (Volkswagen) now basically all cars look the same.
I actually have that mp3 player, it's alright but you can't upload your own playlist files (granted I haven't looked into custom firmware yet).