I'd love more white, personally. I also don't understand the obsession with black. For me, black objects are very difficult to observe in detail, and that irks me.
Well, I have a bunch of lower-end black fans, some of them quite old, from before transparent cases were a thing. They're actually pretty much gray if I don't wipe them off.
Noctua's signature... brown-orange? Whatever that color is, it has the same issue. The blades are basically gray if I don't wipe them.
Haven't seen anybody start a gray craze, though. Though I have a grayish motorbike that also shows dust and dirt like nobody's business (it's a bike I use strictly on paved roads).
Silver is the ideal color for hiding dirt. I had a silver car once. Unless you drove it down a dirt road during a rainstorm, you basically never had to wash it.
If it were about performance and not marketing, they'd try to optimize for resistance to dust adhesion and resource consumption: energy, cost, durability, etc.
Why do you think they don't optimize for things like performance when they often win performance competitions against other vendors for both sound mitigation and airflow?
Do you know they have a specific high efficiency line?
Have you ever had a noctua fan fail where you think another vendor fan would not have?
I have them. They get dusty at about the same rate as a pure black fan (which also shows gray/brown dust quite easily). I need to clean mine about every 6-9 months to keep them looking good enough to "show off". I generally run a Winix HEPA filter in each room of my apartment.
I don't think matte white is worse than matte black in terms of showing dust. They both do.
It seems that common means something very different to you and I. Less than 5% of something is common? To me that sounds like the definition of uncommon!
Because it's a fan and I don't want to see it, and if I must see it, I don't want it to have any color of it's own since chances are very low that whatever color it is just happens to be the perfect addition to all my other posessions next to it.
I don't understand why anyone would think this is an obsession with black.
TIL: Generally all plastics exposed to UV start to photodegrade. If you google why old computers turn particularly yellow most sources point to bromine-based flame retardant agents in the plastic, but some people make a convincing case[1] that ABS just naturally turns yellow in UV light.
Not much real research into that topic, interestingly.
I've had a few experiences with retrobrighting and having it come out really nicely, then after being stored away in a box for a couple of years it's somehow yellow again. It's probably different with different plastics but it doesn't seem so clear cut that it's always the UV light causing it.
Not sure why all the fire retardants are needed. Besides, steel probably retards fire more effectively than most fire retarded resins and is probably far more recyclable.
In the uncommon event that something in your computer catches fire, the flame retardant keeps the fire from igniting the otherwise flammable plastic and potentially burning your house down.
Totally. I used to favor black a long time ago when most computers were still gray and the idea of having everything in black was really cool, but since realizing that details and controls are harder to discern on black, I’m all in on white and silver. It’s also less prone to showing fingerprints.
I always thought the grey Noctua Redux fans were their nicest looking offerring, despite being their lower end. I don't understand how they settled on that.