[carlosjobim]

Well if you go straight to the elephant in question - Apple - their laptops have looked essentially the same for 10 years or even 15 years if you squint. Because they found a design that's near perfect. So it doesn't need to be renewed to communicate reliability and quality.

Motorcycles of the classic cut are still being manufactured and sold in massive quantities, even though the design is about 50 years old. Same for them, customers know that the quality is high so it doesn't need to say "new".

And I'm positive that people would line up to buy cars with classic designs if the manufacturers started caring about what customers actually want. Not that I dislike modern car design, but it hit the sweet spot about 5 years ago IMO.

So at least for hardware I think a classic design works well to communicate quality.

And I think we're soon reaching a similar mood in software GUI as well.