If there's one thing that makes me vomit in my mouth, it's plastic gadgets painted silver

It's not the plastic. I like plastic fine. And although I prefer solid molded colors, painting plastic with other colors is ok, too. It's just that the overriding reason for painting a plastic device silver is to make it look like metal. Which is stupid. This needs to stop as surely as wooden panels on station wagons needed to stop 30 years ago and why tofurky is a totally unacceptable replacement for either turkey or tofu.

Silver painted gadgets started rising in prominence in the cellphone world, and 8 years ago were thought of as a premium finish to those in design circles. "Blame Motorola or Casio," say some designers I talked to about the trend. Now the "tin man" treatment is reserved for the cheapest devices while the best get done up in real metal. I'm still confused as to why this was a good idea in the first place, and why companies, even some high-end brands, still maintain the facade. (I'm totally looking at you, Pentax, Canon, Dell and Sony.)

First off, it's insulting to buyer intelligence. Are makers trying to fool us into thinking a device is aluminum or magnesium or stainless steel when its actually a light piece of bent polymer? Maybe from 10 feet away, they'd think that we couldn't tell the difference, and they'd be right. Visually. Allan Chochinov from Core77, says:

Painting plastic objects so that they appear metallic is a fudge of course—and often convincingly so. But the lie becomes apparent soon enough; at the corners or wherever there's any kind of friction, the paint wears away to reveal the true plastic.

Industrial designers talk about the virtues of an "honesty of materials" in design practice, and when that honesty is expressed in the final product

Which brings us to cost. Yes, like most commercial compromises made in the world, plastic made to look like metal for the most part comes down to saving dollars in manufacturing. Cormac Eubanks, a principal engineer from Frog design told me: it's really great—but rare. With the almost-suffocating cost constraints and real pressure to pump things out quickly, the artifice is just too irresistible

As a raw material metal (aluminum or zinc alloy) is many times more expensive than the same volume of material in plastic. In processing metal, parts need to be die cast, stamped, or (if money is no object) machined. Then one needs to finish them with brushing, tumbling and/or bead blasting. Lastly metal parts need to go through a plating or anodize process to prevent corrosion and oxidation over time. All these finishing steps add considerable additional cost. Painting plastic on the other hand can be inexpensively injection molded and painted silver in large volumes in a repeatable way.

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