White Boxes Are In The Black - Or Black And Silver

Or black with silver trim.

Several system-building solution providers are finding that requests for all-black, black with silver trim or even all-silver boxes are creeping into

customers' orders.

GST/Micro City, a Cerritos, Calif.-based solution provider, puts prototype black/silver "white" boxes side-by-side with beige systems so its mainly education and government customers can compare the two, said Steve Manteros, general manager at the company. Purchases of the two-tone systems are starting to pick up, he said.

Despite the demise of colorful systems such as the Mattel Barbie and Hot Wheels brands of PCs, color,especially black,will continue to grow in popularity, said Jason Windsor, co-owner of Dreamachine, an Everett, Wash.-based white-box builder.

There's still a premium attached to color, though.

"Color will pick up without a doubt," he said. "Only pricing and availability are holding it back."

Manteros said the biggest problem is sourcing peripherals,such as CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives, monitors, keyboards and mice,with matching colors. Teac America, Montebello, Calif., charges a premium for non-beige optical drives, while San Jose, Calif.-based Sony Electronics doesn't, he said. "But more suppliers are moving to color," he said.

Monitor maker ViewSonic, Walnut, Calif., started making two-tone monitors about a year ago and now offers black/silver and all-black CRT and LCD models with no difference in price from beige models. It also offers black/silver and all-silver keyboards and mice.

Samsung Electronics America, Irvine, Calif., offers CRT monitors in black, as well as LCD monitors in black, silver and black/silver. Low-volume CRT monitors in nonstandard colors may be priced $5 to $10 higher, but there is no premium for colored LCD monitors. The company's optical drives are all available in black as well.

Although the industry is awash in blue Cobalt server appliances, red VPN servers, yellow Symantec servers and even black fault-tolerant servers, not everyone thinks non-beige has a future.

"Absolutely nobody thinks about color," said Ron Kramer, vice president and COO at All Computer Solutions, a Portland, Maine-based systems builder. "Even the fancy HP boxes,no one notices the color."