The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

One thing that set SGI apart from the rest was that their cases were so incredibly pretty. Even today, the most beautiful PC cases barely play in the same league (IMHO). When Apple started building those colorful cases around ~2000, they reached that level of aesthetic appeal, but then they went for brushed metal (which is also very pretty, but not that pretty, IMHO).

Had one of the major PC vendors hired their designers and built just run-of-the-mill PCs, housing them in those amazing cases, I wonder how that would have worked out.

Interesting - some of them look neat, sure, but they also look fairly cheap. The O2 especially. The construction certainly isn't high quality, they're just stamped coil steel boxes with plastic wrapped around them. Some OEMs still do this, like this Alienware, which is just a squared-off miditower dressed up in a plastic shell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1dlVPzUVo&t=8m10s

Of course in the 90s this would've been quite modern I imagine, considering that the competition was gray painted steel boxes and steel cabinets with a gray powder coat.