[turretslug]

I'm a fan of elegant, efficient, effective production engineering (but not when taken to Ford Pinto cynical extremes!) Thus, (currently topical) the AR88 impresses me more than the Telefunken E52- the latter would have been an admirable achievement in peacetime but the former was the more rational route under duress. Similarly, the Sony Walkman impresses more than the Kudelski/Nagra IV in terms of precision mass production. The E52 and Nagra IV may be delightful pieces of engineering-for-the-sake-of-it jewellery but not really relevant to contemporary consumers.

Perhaps those bright orange spherical TVs were the equivalent of Bakelite Ekcos- consciously demonstrating the attributes of a new material (even if not always to mainstream taste!)

I suppose the themed material of the current consumer era would be industrial cardboard (sorry, MDF...)