The 'outdoor unit that looks awful' is an interesting quirk especially with US equipment - most Japanese and European residential units actually look fine, I'm not sure why American ones have tended to look especially ugly.

I notice this with electrical stuff too - things like switchboards etc. in residential and light commercial installations we have quite neat stuff that's usually quite streamlined and in light white/grey/cream colours, whereas the switchboards and conduits and thigns I see in videos of US home installations look like grey chunky metal stuff that you'd only see in heavy industrial sites here!