Men Who Plan Beyond Tomorrow!

Back in the mid-1940s, Seagram’s advertised its VO Canadian whiskey with a series of extremely manly magazine ads about “Men Who Plan Beyond Tomorrow”–unspecified futuristic thinkers who liked the fact that Seagram’s was patient enough to age VO for six years. No, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either. But the ads, each of which depicted a different miracle that would transform postwar America, are glorious. They’re entertaining when they sort-of-accurately predict scenarios that eventually came to be, such as the rise of the cell phone. And they’re even more so when they marvel at wonders-to-be such as coin-operated streetcorner fax machines. Herewith, some highlights as they appeared in LIFE magazine–click the dates to see the issues with the ads at Google Books.

Joe Wilcox on Apple’s Tablet

I can understand how you can be a tablet skeptic–hey, I’m one myself–but I don’t quite see how you can be so certain that a product that nobody knows anything about for sure will be a failure…

Nexus One Review by Engadget

The Engadget guys have gotten their hands on Google’s Nexus One phone, and have posted some first impressions. They like it but aren’t completely gaga over it…

More Tablet Musings

Over at Ars Technica, John Siracusa provides some more worthwhile pondering about Apple’s “iSlate.” Even if the product somehow mysteriously fails to appear, it’s prompted some good reads (amid a lot of pointless blathering, it’s true). On slow news weeks, maybe we should make up imaginary Apple products and discuss them.

Ten Million Apple Tablets? A Little Historical Frame of Reference

Apple rumor of the moment: Former Google, Microsoft, and Apple executive Kai-Fu Lee has blogged that he’s heard Apple thinks it can sell ten million “iSlate” tablet computers in its first year on the market. (I persist in putting quotes around “iSlate” since we don’t know if that’s the product’s name, assuming there is a product at all.)

That ten-million tablet is merely a rumor, albeit one spread by a smart guy who may have excellent sources. It certainly sounds ambitious. But how ambitious is it? For the sake of comparison, I dug up some sales figures for other Apple products–starting with the Apple I, and including both numbers reported by Apple and some third-party estimates. Here they are, after the jump.
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