The consumer Macs made a big turn toward aluminum styling with the release of the 2007 iMac. It made it's way to the lower end MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs, and ever since then, we have been living with basically the same industrial design scheme. It's kind of boring.
I'll be starting a restore of a Performa 6116CD soon, and can so far say one thing - the bodies of these aluminum Macs will never fade or yellow like the plastic bodies of Macs released between '84 and '07.
As boring as these aluminum Macs are, they're going to age so much better.