It's a Dell, why are you surprised? All the Dell products I've seen have the same amount of design sense as the Windows XP Fisher-Price UI. Dell is a company that assembles computers. If you want fine architecture, you don't get a prefab house.

Sadly, none of the major computer manufacturers besides Apple seem to have any sense of design. The old ThinkPads (when they were still IBM) are the nearest competitor; at least they were solid, square, and black looking. Stylish, not so much, but at least they looked professional. (I guess Microsoft gave it a good try with the surface; the hardware at least looks kind of cool)

I disagree. I have an old IBM ThinkPad from the era when IBM still made PCs. Dell is pretty close.

Their laptops are on the shitty Toshiba-ish side of things, granted (although higher quality build). But their monitors and keyboards are top notch. Simple, black, non-glossy bezel. USB ports on the side. Swivel, portrait, and height base adjustments. Their keyboards remain consistent with the 1980s standard PC arrow/home/numpad configuration and not that weird Microsoft/Logitech shit of putting tiny arrow keys in random locations, or F-lock.

I'd guess Dell simply doesn't care, and doesn't have to since most of it's revenue isn't related to looks at all. Maybe they look at it this way: it's a screen, so 99.9999% of the time you'll be looking at the screen, and not at the frame around it. So we don't spend any time on designing a nice looking frame (besides, nice looking is highly subjective) and don't let customers pay even more for the product because of that.

I would have to disagree. Displays have shifted to black bezels to facilitate the disappearance of them. When looking at a bright object, darker colors fade away, helping shift focus to the center (the screen) and reduce distraction. Giving a high-end screen a silver bezel illustrates how little they care about the end user experience. It ultimately is distracting. What is even worse in this case is that the case is reminiscent of the cheap monitors they've been selling to businesses for years.

I am surprised you cannot get a choice of snap-on bezels, Dell have done this for the backs of notebooks on and off for years.

I doubt there would be a lot of interest in lurid colours. However, 'stealth black', 'piano black', 'paper white' and 'cubicle grey' might increase the USP and appeal to some customers. The white might make sense to those doing desktop publishing, the stealth black might appeal to those doing video in a darkened, distraction free environment, the grey might appeal to Apple users and the shiny black could be the default option.

In corporate and customer facing environments a muted bright colour that happens to be consistent with branding might make sense so logo-free bezels in red, green and blue could sell too.

Although the Apple commentary put this in troll territory, I'd have to otherwise agree. The monitor definitely doesn't say 'high end' the way the Apple or other expensive monitors in the market do. They really couldn't give it slicker design that doesn't match their $299 monitors? http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&l=en&s...

If you look carefully you'll notice that the only difference between the $299 monitors and the Ultra HD monitor in term of design is a thinner bezel. Maybe it would have increased the price much more for virtually nothing to have a thinner bezel on their new screen. Also, they don't have any competitor for this screen, so they don't need to distinguish themselves from the competition like they do with the "borderless" 24" screen.

I personally don't find them cheap looking and I'd rather have a "plastic" looking bezel with a mate screen over a sleek looking screen with an all-glass shiny front.

I agree. Dell monitors' matte screens are really nice.