Media: Zeitgeist - Microsoft puts a 50s veneer on its home entertainment Media Center for the future

Forget black technobricks or slim silver boxes - consumer electronics are changing their looks. And as for all the tinted translucent Perspex (to date, the coolest look in personal computing), as sported by the iMac - chuck it out. The sleek white of an iPod? Passe. This year's big thing in consumer electronics is, wait for it, wood veneer. Or actually, if we're being pedantic, wood-veneer "effect". This is Microsoft's secret weapon as it tries to kill off a whole generation of home-entertainment electronics and replace it all with a single living-room computer. In the UK, wood is back in fashion in the design of DAB radio sets. But now there's broader sentiment in the design community that the 50s are ready to be plundered. As for the Media Center itself, it looks a bit like a slimline cocktail cabinet, don't you think? Which, as it happens, chimes happily with Zeitgeist's notion of what constitutes home entertainment.