Month: December 2012

Assembled in the USA ⇥ 9to5mac.com

The dudes and dudettes at iFixIt (via 9to5Mac) noticed that their new iMac was engraved with an “Assembled in the USA” moniker. It’s possibly the first complete Apple product since 1997 to sport those words.

Update: MacRumors says they’ve noticed this since 2006 for built-to-order models. But, as 9to5Mac notes in the above link, “assembled” doesn’t just mean “finished” or “badge added” in the US.

Philip Elmer-Dewitt at Fortune says that a reader wrote in to say that their off-the-shelf iMac was assembled in the US.

The Future of Search ⇥ brooksreview.net

Benjamin Brooks:

So as I think about the future, I have to wonder how bad this ultimately will be for users. If I buy 100% into the Apple culture and 0% into Google, everything will be fine until I want to switch from Apple to Google. At that point, how do I recreate all this backlog of data for Google to then be useful for me? As Google would be starting with me as I just came into existence.

Good question. I’ve been thinking of the nature of lock-in, to whatever degree, for a while now because it seems to me that it’s the most important reason for the average user to avoid experimenting with platforms.

Damien Hirst: Jumping the Shark ⇥ businessweek.com

Great article by Andrew Rice of Bloomberg Businessweek:

James Kelly, chief executive of Hirst’s private company Science Ltd., says his boss “has transcended all confines of the art world” and is unconcerned about the auction results. “Certain artworks that come to auction are being priced, one could say, more realistically at today’s values,” Kelly says. “However, the long-term view is that prices for Damien’s work will be strong.”

Hirst’s naysayers doubt that. They trace his fall to a $200 million auction staged in 2008, on the day Lehman Brothers collapsed. Hirst sold hundreds of works directly to bidders, defying the custom of restricting supply. “Hirst screwed with his market, and it came back to bite him,” says Michael Plummer, principal of the investment advisory firm Artvest Partners. “He broke the economic rules of the industry.”

Hirst’s works are a challenge for similar reasons as Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics are, but they’re very exciting artworks.