I remember theming my mac and windows machines as a kid! Somehow all we're left with is corporate sponsored blandness and a user base who does not care about having fun with what they own, they just want a basic tool to browse the web. (and I guess ownership is much more muddied now anyway)
I think what you say is partly true—systems are definitely more locked down nowadays and we mostly just accept what corporations give us. But I think this is also, at least in part, consumer-driven. Computers are less of a novelty nowadays, so fewer people are interested in tweaking and configuring for the sake of it, while more are just looking to get work done.
I took my old white polycarbonate MacBook to the Apple store a few years back to get a new battery.
I had a few people ask me about it, and even one lady asked at the genius bar whether she could get a MacBook in a colour. People pick aluminium chassis because the alternative is cheap gray, fake metal chassis. I miss the era of colourful iMacs and I think other people do too, and not just geeks.
> But I think this is also, at least in part, consumer-driven.
I can't disagree more.
Consumers haven't requested this, and up until this ability was taken away people did theme their XP, etc.
There weren't many options without hacking but changing the XP blue bar to silver or green regularly happened. People are just taught to accept that this is how it is now though.
Back then you could only change the colors, but the decorations stayed the same. You had to use third party tools to make real changes. That's still true today, although the colors you can change on your own are much more limited. The difference is that these theming communities are much less active, and that's probably because nearly everything lives in the browser.
