Monday 10 November 2014

Milan, Cold and Hard

Ilford HP400

Off to Milan, coincidentally the same week as Milan Fashion Week, which takes place in Milan. It involves fashion and it takes place in Milan over the course of a week. Start again.

Off to Milan, with my Yashica Mat. Milan is hard, angular, and polished, and in that respect it's a mirror of the fashion world and those who sail in it. I used black and white because it was an overcast, dull day. Not once did Cara Delevingne invite me to a party while I was there. Perhaps she was too busy.

The history of Apple Computer is long and convoluted; the company is nowadays a giant, but its decision to omit Computer from its name in 2007 had a melancholic aspect to it. Melancholic because Apple's computer-computers circa the mid-2000s were solid machines running an excellent operating system, it's just that times had changed and Apple had changed and perhaps it was better that way.

It's fascinating to ponder Apple purely as a computer company, but of course iPhones and iPads are computers just as much as the iMac and Mac Pro. I mention Apple because an Apple product will appear in the next post, the very first post on this blog to mention Apple products in a substantive way.

The irony is that after a few years of a stagnating computer line the recent 5K iMac is a strikingly cromulent piece of equipment that appeals even to die-hard PC users, counterbalanced slightly by the cut-down new Mac Mini, which has its memory stick soldered in place. In the late 1980s and 1990s Apple's insistence on The Apple Way or Nothing was generally seen as a bad thing, but IBM was just as autocratic, and IBM exited the PC business in stages during the first half of the 2000s. In that respect Apple won that particular fight, not so much because Apple and IBM had different strategies, but because they had different targets, which they approached in different ways.