Wordplay and Cornell’s prince

I guess five hours is my limit in museums these days. Boy, I’m not even 30 and my stamina is shot to hell. 🙂 However, I found a couple of really cool things in the short time I wandered around.


Cornell's Medici prince, on display in the East Gallery of Washington's National Gallery.

First, Cornell’s Untitled (Medici Boy) is in fact on display in the National Gallery’s East Wing; it wasn’t there two years ago. They’ve moved it with the two works that were previously displayed to the second level—while I didn’t get as much of a cool feeling of exclusivity as I did in the days when you had to climb up to the tower to find them, the works are placed much more prominently.

Second, Xu Bing. Contemporary Chinese artist whose medium is calligraphy—but what calligraphy! A permanently installed three story mobile chains together the word for “monkey” in eighteen languages, each fragment shaped like a monkey. A flat plane containing three dimensional Chinese characters describing birds takes flight, as characters for “bird” become shaped into a flock of birds. A room is filled with scrolls, newspapers, and books printed with “Chinese” characters that in fact have no meaning. Walls are filled with a hand calligraphed speech from Mao — but the characters are English words written as though they were Chinese calligraphy. (This was a favorite—there were two indigo iMacs in the room running a Mac OS X program that took a typed English sentence and rendered it in this style of calligraphy in near real time. Okay, after 30 seconds. But the first few words of “The Waste Land” look really cool as neo-Chinese calligraphy.)

Not that I would know

Okay, so my arms have mostly recovered from yesterday’s marathon blog. I’m still thinking about the new iMac, and my conclusion is that they’ve done a fine job of hitting their target market. Not power users, not Linux guys, but the many more people who need a computer to help them get things done. Regarding appearance, it is, as Seal said, very 2001: A Space Odyssey. I also like what “Doc” wrote yesterday from the convention floor: “What seemed to have everyone most fascinated afterwards at the press ‘viewing’ was the shiny metal arm that connects the base to the monitor. It looks like a chrome dildo…”

Dave, we hardly knew amiable entrepreneur ye

(I asked Tim at our family reunion on Saturday if he intended to do any blogging while on the road. “Maybe a little,” he said. I’d like to draw derisive attention to the “little” that takes up the rest of this page. Geeze Louise.)

Sad news today, folks: Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, has died. Hats off and a moment of silence for the creator of the Spicy Chicken Sandwich.
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In Store Updates

Sorry–I lost something when my machine went down and that news item got corrupted. Anyway: 14″ iBooks are here today. New iMac will be here on Thursday for display and for sale in two weeks. Firesale pricing on old iMacs and on the DVD-only iBook. And iPhoto is available for download.

Pushback

By the way, Dave and John Robb, have to push back about content management software and Apple. My mother in law needs to be able to manage her photos. That will help Apple sell computers. They’re leaving you a space in the ecosystem to capture the mindshare of all of us bloggers.

Prognostication?

Steve’s getting hoarse, I think. Now I’d like to end by talking for a few seconds about our strategy. One word: to innovate. We have been busy in the last 12 months and innovating while most of our competitors have been retrenching and laying off. Why? Because I think we can see the future…. Hey, there’s no “one more thing!” Good. My fingers hurt.

First reactions

An email from a reader about the new iMac. Frank Himsl thinks “It looks like a small, expensive flat screen perched on top of a $15 electric tea kettle.” Here’s another question, how easy is it to keep clean?

More iMac details

The base is 10.5 ” in diameter. Expandability: four screws on the bottom–will hold up to a gig of memory and an Airport card. Antennas built into the display. Three models. 15″, 700 MHz, 128 MB, 40GB, CD-RW: $1299. Next: 256 MB and a combo drive, $1499. Last: 800 MHz, 60 GB, and a SuperDrive: $1799. Moore’s Law in action, folks. Superdrive model available January, midline Feb, $1299 in March. (Learning curve effects to support the low price models.)

The new iMac

It’s an all-in one… “This is the opportunity of the decade to reshape desktop computers.” “What I think everyone else is going to do: We could have taken a hacksaw to it. But there’s nothing flat about it… and there would be cable mess and we’d have to slow everything down.” “Let each component be true to itself.” A box rises from the stage, the flat screen pops up–and there’s this half round thing underneath. The flat panel is on a chrome arm. One touch move and swivel, the display stays parallel…180 swivel. The disk drive is a slide out tray. The ports are arranged across a 60 degree arc in the back. It’s about 6 inches tall. The power supply is built into the base, no brick. Unbelievable.

iMac changes

“Lastly, let’s talk about the iMac.” Ad roll (stalling). Even though we’ve all seen these about a million times before, some are still classic (“There’s no step 3,” “It’s not easy bein’ green…”). “A three year evolution, and I’m really amazed to report we’ve sold 6 million iMacs. But today we’re going to say goodbye to that iMac. We’re going to introduce a brand new iMac designed from the ground up.” Flat screen…”and we said Yes.” 15 inch LCD screen standard (applause at Tysons). “This is the official death of the CRT today.” G4…”and we said Yes.” At 700 or 800 MHz. “It speeds up everything in the Digital Hub.” Superdrive…”and we said Yes.” “And as of today the discs are $5 apiece.” nVidia GeForce 2 MX with 32MB memory and 24bit at all resolutions. 5 USB, 2 Firewire, internal speakers and Apple Pro speakers in two of the three models. “What about the design?”