Last week I passed an electronics recycling event outside the Tekserve store on West 23rd Street.  It filled me with sadness seeing hundreds of hard drives, monitors and speakers, formerly state-of-the-art stuff, being abandoned.  Over time they’d lost their allure.

Then I saw a gentleman carrying over a banged-up Bondi blue iMac G3 and my heart lept.  This is a pretty, joyous machine.  Its translucent case, look-at-me color, and softly swollen shape still seem fresh.  Compared with the sleek, chic, anti-material aesthetic of current Apple products, it’s appealingly naive.