The revival of paintings of interiors in the middle of the nineteenth century flourished in several ways. For some, it was an opportunity to reveal their studio, and perhaps provide the viewer with a little insight into the artist. For others it was a way to recreate interiors of the past, or to deliver open-ended narrative.

The Painter and His Model (1855) shows one of Alfred Stevens’ young and fashionable models leaning over his shoulder, as he works on her portrait.

Stevens was an early enthusiast for the Japonisme that swept Paris. Insights into his life such as his The Psyché (My Studio) (c 1871) repay closer reading. The French word psyché refers to the full-length mirror seen in this apparently informal view of Stevens’ studio, the name deriving from the legend of Cupid and Psyche.

For this painting, Stevens doesn’t actually use a proper psyché, but has mounted a large mirror on his easel, perhaps to suggest that art is a reflection of life. A Japanese silk garment is draped over the mirror to limit its view to the model, breaking up her form in an unnatural way. At the lower right, the artist indicates his presence with a cigarette, and there is a small parrot who might imitate his speech. The studio is littered with Japanese prints and the artist’s canvases, and one painting on the wall is a study for his early What They Call Vagrancy, lacking most of its figures.

Léon Frédéric’s extraordinary Studio Interior from 1882 appears to be a fantasy self-portrait of the artist naked with a skeleton on his lap. The latter has been dressed up in undergarments with a long starry veil over them. His palette and brushes are at the lower right, and his clothes, including a top hat, are draped on chairs.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sunday Morning from about 1871 goes back to the interior of a house in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. The mistress of the house has just had a baby, and her midwife is holding that baby as she looks out into the daylight. This is a smaller version of a previous painting by Alma-Tadema titled A Birth Chamber, Seventeenth Century (1868), that extended the view to include the mother in bed.

The Music Room, painted by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate in 1871 using oils, shows the fine quality of his conservative oil paintings. It’s worth bearing in mind that at this time the French Impressionists had already established their very different style, and this work is more typical of paintings from a century earlier. While this music room features a couple singing to the accompaniment of the piano, and there are musical instruments in the centre foreground, everyone else in the room is engaged in decidedly non-musical activities.

In 1872, James Tissot embarked on a series of paintings and engravings set in a tavern on the bank of the River Thames in London, probably in Rotherhithe or Wapping. The first to be exhibited was his An Interesting Story (c 1872). It’s the late 1700s, and an old soldier is telling one or more pretty young women interminable and incomprehensible stories about his military career, with the aid of charts spread out on the table. Here, the story is dubbed ‘interesting’ in irony.

Edgar Degas painted A Cotton Office in New Orleans in 1873, when he visited his mother’s family in New Orleans. It features several family portraits, and has a narrative background, showing a cotton buyer visiting the Musson cotton merchants. The elderly gentleman wearing a top hat, in the foreground, is Michel Musson, Degas’ uncle, and a partner in the business. Edgar Degas’ brothers Achille and René are slightly further back on the left (leaning idly against the open window), and sat reading a newspaper, respectively. Standing at the desk on the right is John Lavaudais, the cashier. The figures echo and repeat one another across and into the depths of the room, in dress, posture, and appearance.

While almost everyone else in the painting is lounging around, business is being transacted between the buyer and broker on either side of the table covered with the cotton, the broker being at the centre of the canvas. This small pool of commerce within an image dominated by idleness and dolce far niente reflects the situation of Degas and his family at the time.

At about the same time in New York, the American genre artist Eastman Johnson painted a narrative work that only makes any sense when you know its title of Not at Home (c 1873), showing the interior of the artist’s home. Without those three words of the title, all you see is a well-lit and empty parlour, and the presumed mistress of the house starting up the stairs, in relative gloom in the foreground. At the right is a child’s push-chair, parked up and empty.

Those three words, of course, are the classic excuse offered in someone’s absence – “I am sorry, but the Mistress is not at home” – even when they are very much at home, but simply don’t want to see the visitor. So the title could imply that the woman is ascending the stairs in order not to see visitors. Or, if we know that this is the artist’s home, could it be that it’s Johnson himself who’s not at home?

Interiors don’t have to be domestic, as demonstrated by Louis Béroud’s early Staircase of the Opéra Garnier from 1877.

At about this time, Nordic artists started to realise the potential of interiors as explorations of light, led by the work of Harriet Backer.

Avskjeden (The Farewell) (1878) was probably Backer’s first really successful painting. It shows a grown daughter, left of centre, bidding farewell to her family as she leaves home. Backer probably painted this from her own emotional experience, as her father died in 1877, and she had informed her mother that she didn’t intend returning home, but to pursue her painting career instead.

When she travelled to France, her style began to loosen up: another early success was her Solitude (c 1880), her first painting accepted for the Salon in 1880. This was one of her first interiors featuring limited light, whose play was to become a dominant theme in her art.

Backer’s Blue Interiør from 1883 develops the theme of the play of light from the window on the person and contents of the interior of the room. Here the composition is complicated by the presence of a large mirror at the left.

Plus, for $200, he was the voice of the internet.

© Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

The Tesla billionaire is a key figure in the president-elect’s orbit. One question is whether his views on climate and clean energy will have any sway.

© Doug Mills/The New York Times

It requested information from a handful of firms that make chip manufacturing possible about their commercial ties to China.

© Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Early in the internet era, he was also behind AOL’s “Welcome!” “File’s done” and “Goodbye” messages. “They said my voice was heard more than 35 million times a day.”

© Phil Long for The New York Times

It requested information from a handful of firms that make chip manufacturing possible about their commercial ties to China.

The president-elect is again calling out companies by name in his campaign against what he sees as other countries’ unfair practices.

2001 年，《老友记》第七季正在美国播出，斩获了约 2000 万平均收视人数，位列当年全美电视节目收视率的前五名。

这部从上世纪走来的经典美剧，虽然热度有些下降，但漫长的播出生命线带来了一些额外的彩蛋——剧中的产品伴随时代更迭而变迁。无论是 Nokia 手机、PlayStation 还是 Windows 系统，都有着浓烈的时代属性，寻找这些代表了一个时代的「标志物」，一度是观众津津乐道的话题。

而这一季，有个新家伙登场。

独特的半透明外壳、以浓厚的红色为主色调、屏幕边缘包裹着透明的塑料材质，以及透过外壳可以隐约看到内部的构造，放在精心设计的片场中也能第一时间抓住人的眼球。

iMac G3，这是乔布斯回归苹果后发布的首批重要作品之一。

在发布会上，乔布斯对这台技术与艺术完美结合的设备定位极其清晰：

iMac 让电脑使用变得更简单。

那是千禧年前后，互联网还是个新鲜玩意，电脑则没那么友好，设计呆板无趣、界面晦涩复杂，没有吸引力的同时学习成本也相当地高。

苹果想让 iMac 成为人们探索这个未知世界的门户，所以它技术理念先进、它使用直观易懂、它设计优雅好看，苹果甚至专门推出了一条宣传片，就为了表明 iMac 简单又有趣，连小孩子都能轻松使用。

最终目的很简单——要让每个看到它的人都跃跃欲试。

不负众望，以这个角度切入市场的 iMac G3 大获成功，被视为苹果复兴的标志。

二十六年后，iMac M4 发布。

门面担当，性能不弱

第一眼看过去，iMac M4 最显眼的就是同样多的配色，甚至连官网的宣传标题都将彩色元素置入其中。

iMac M4 的整体配色遵循了 iMac M3 的方案：搭配相同颜色的不同饱和度，形成 iMac 的色彩美学。

高饱和度的颜色覆盖了 iMac 的整个背部面板，使其在任何角度下都能呈现出浓郁的视觉冲击力，清淡的同色系 logo 与背面的浓烈形成对比，以便在任何环境中，人们都可以一眼看见这个协调又亮眼的家伙。

清淡的颜色还填补了剩下的细节：正面底部面板与支架都选择用较低饱和度的同色系颜色示人，营造出柔和的视觉效果，让用户在使用屏幕时不易分散注意力，这倒是与苹果一贯的注意力理论相匹配。

清淡的颜色与 iMac M3 一样，保留在更换了 USB-C 接口的妙控键盘与妙控鼠标上，虽然键鼠与 iMac 不是一个整体，但依然能在复杂的环境中轻松辨认它们的配套身份。

值得一提的是，这一代的电源线也拥有了与 iMac 本体匹配的清淡颜色，而不是标配白色了。

与配色相符合的就是它的产品定位——看到这样颜色鲜艳讨喜，设计简约的 iMac，你只会想做些愉快轻松的事情，而不会想把它带到枯燥又烦闷的专业环境中。

就像全球著名设计咨询公司 IDEO 的首席执行官兼总裁蒂姆·布朗说的：

性能决定了你的产品能做什么，而设计决定了用户如何去做。

在这一代 iMac 上，最大的变化是它的大脑——M4 芯片登场。

爱范儿拿到手的是一台顶配 iMac，搭载满血 M4 芯片，32GB 内存与 2T 固态硬盘，我们先按照惯例，对它进行了一次跑分。

在 GeekBench 6 中，iMac M4 获得了单核 3699 分、多核 14833 分的成绩，作为对比，上一代 iMac M3 的单核成绩为 3138 分，多核 11912 分，获得了约百分之二十的性能提升。

今年的 WWDC，苹果宣布了 Apple Intelligence 的登场，AI 正式成为苹果产品必须具备的功能，AI 性能成为躲不开的话题。

同样是 GeekBench，iMac M4 在 AI 测试中通过 CPU 获得了单精度 4687 分、量化分数 6268 的成绩，作为对比，iMac M3 的得分为 4103 和 5615。

单精度分数代表 iMac M4 在高精度、细致计算任务（如复杂图像识别）中的能力，而量化分数则展示了它在快速、省电任务（如实时语音助手）中的效率。

不过，我们始终认为纸面参数仅供参考，只有当这些参数化作这台 iMac 的实际体验时，才赋予其真正的意义。

作为一位文字工作者，与一名摄影师，正好模拟日常大部分的使用场景，试试这台设计与性能并驾齐驱的 iMac M4。

写作需要大量的知识储备，特别是在自己不够熟悉的领域，常常需要依赖浏览器查询资料，让我能「博古通今」。

由于资料散落在互联网的各个角落，我常常需要同时打开许多网页进行翻阅。然而，许多网页包含复杂的脚本、动画或后台任务，一旦开启，CPU、GPU 和 RAM 需要并行处理各种任务，成为电脑性能的隐形杀手。

此时，iMac 能支持我同时浏览多少个网页，很关键。

测试中，我打开了 50 个网页，覆盖视频、小游戏、新闻、带动效的官网等类别，在网页全都加载完成后，我快速切换每个网页，并使用其中的动效和小游戏，iMac M4 依旧丝滑，没有任何卡顿出现。

虽然大家更为熟知的是透明大背头 iMac G3 与台灯电脑 iMac G4，但 iMac G5 才是至关重要的一代。

2004 年，一根支架撑起的「白色相框」，为未来的 iMac 设计奠定了基础。

20 年后，同样是一根支架撑起了 iMac M4，以及正面分辨率 4480 x 2520 的 24 英寸 4.5K 视网膜显示屏。

不过，一台显示屏可不够。

在我日常使用中，稿件、网页、图片处理与微信等交流工具常常同时存在，来回切换十分分散注意力，多台显示屏成为了刚需。

经过测试，这台搭载满血 M4 芯片的 iMac 支持同时连接两台分辨率为 6K（60Hz）的外接显示器，并且同时运行 Safari 浏览器、飞书、微信、剪映等日常生活工作需要的应用时没有出现明显卡顿。

一台 iMac 再加两台外置显示屏，每个任务终于都可以优雅地排列在屏幕上，不用从一堆软件的堆叠中找自己需要的界面了。

互联网的发展史，其实也是数码照片的传播史，图片随着网络一起，成为人们最基础的信息媒介之一。

摄影是我的爱好，也是我工作的一部分，在此之前，我从不会使用公司的 MacBook Air 做图片工作——因为太卡。

这不可避免地占用了我不少的休息时间。

在 M4 的加持下，新 iMac 能否承担一定的图片处理任务，这至关重要。

为了测试 iMac M4 的图片处理功能，我准备了 7 张由富士中画幅相机 GFX 100S 拍摄的图片，通过 iMac 背部的四个雷雳 4 接口传输到 Photoshop 中，使用 Photomerge 功能进行全景接片。

这七张照片每张 1 亿像素，接片后去掉重叠部分，再进行矫正，像素量达到了 4.7 亿，工程文件大小为 10.7GB。

在合成之后，我打算对这张全景照片进行调色，试试它处理静态图片的极限在哪里。

要知道，在如此庞大的像素压力下，实时处理图片是个极具挑战性的任务，性能不够的电脑往往不能实时预览调色效果，要等操作结束一两秒后才能看到调整效果。

别小看这一两秒，这一点卡顿就足以让用户拿起手机，转移本来专注的注意力。

在 iMac M4 上，我对这张全景接片先后进行了曝光调整、曲线调整、HSL 调整，并使用了三个蒙版工具，对照片做精细化调整。

在二十分钟的后期过程中，无论是对图片进行接片、畸变矫正，还是后续的曝光、颜色等基本参数进行调整，或是用蒙版精细处理局部细节，iMac 都没有掉链子。

看来，静态影像还难不倒它。

在静态影像测试时，我想到一个梗：

剪辑已经成为一个人必备的基础技能。

这句玩笑话，我听到不止一次了。

虽然有夸张的意思，但随着流媒体平台与短视频平台的兴起，视频成为信息流通的重要工具，无论是消遣娱乐，还是学习工作，都离不开这种动态媒介。

剪辑视频的能力，的确愈发重要。

普通的剪辑肯定不在话下，但生活中难免遇到偶尔超标的需求，比如调色，iMac M4 能胜任吗？

在这次测试中，我将单条 4K 60 帧，Apple ProRess 422 Proxy 规格的 Log 视频放进达芬奇，进行了一系列调整，包括：Lut 还原、白平衡调整、曝光调整、添加胶片光晕、添加胶片颗粒、降噪与锐化等一系列操作。

这对于 iMac 而言是一个不小的挑战。

在前面的还原与调色效果中，我可以在预览界面实时查看渲染过的视频，当加入胶片光晕与颗粒效果后，预览帧率下降到每秒 15 帧左右，此时还能勉强对画面进行实时的动态预览。

等降噪效果登场，iMac 才彻底吃力起来——预览界面的帧率下降到每秒 3 帧左右，几乎不可用于动态预览，只能在设置好降噪参数后先关闭节点，等输出前再打开。

这条测试视频总时长为 20 秒，共 1200 帧，输出为 4K 60 帧 H.264 视频所用时间为：

• 带降噪与锐化效果：11 分 59 秒
• 不带降噪与锐化效果：1 分 42 秒

从实时预览的帧率与输出速度来看，此时，iMac 几乎已经触及了自己的性能边界。

我通常只用达芬奇做粗剪与调色，等到输出以后再放到 Final Cut Pro X 中做剪辑（更偷懒的话就用剪映），这很容易让输出的片段四处散乱，得益于 iMac M4 上双双突破 3000MB/s 的读写速度，我可以在非常短的时间里完成这些零碎片段的整理工作。

从这一系列测试来看，iMac 在 M4 的加持下，完全可以轻松处理繁琐的基础任务，偶尔的「出格」需求也不在话下，虽然差点没扛住比较基础的降噪处理，但表现足以让我满意。

毕竟，对于一台更偏向于日常工作娱乐使用的电脑，快慢只是时间问题，跨过「能做」这个门槛，才是最重要的。

褪去束缚，回归本质

我们以十年为一期，纵观 iMac 的发展，背后其实隐藏着很有意思的变化。

1998 年，第一台 iMac G3 诞生。

凭借设计的优越与使用的简单，让 iMac 成为大众喜欢用、乐于用的电脑，由此成为了苹果的常青树之一。

十年过去，随着用户需求逐渐开始细分，专业软件如雨后春笋进入个人电脑。

2009 年，iMac 27 英寸与 21.5 英寸推出。

两种尺寸的屏幕、更强的 intel core i5 和 core i7 处理器、更多的 RAM，都是为用户日益多样化的使用需求准备的配置。

爱范儿的办公室里就还有一台搭载 intel 处理器的 iMac，它没有先进的 M 系列芯片，也没有多彩的颜色设计，但得益于当时苹果提供了足够多的定制选择，让它依旧很强大——在同时期的 MacBook Pro 已经相当吃力的今天，这台老 iMac 依旧可以快速响应我的需求。

又一个周期过去，随着科技进一步进展，人们对电脑的专业需求已不再浅尝即止，不同的用户，使用需求也愈发细分。

隔行如隔山，不同的行业之间的需求可能大相径庭，由于 iMac 本身一体机的特性，苹果官方提供的配置已经不足以满足所有用户五花八门的个性化需求了。

这才有了现在的 Mac 现状——Mac mini 凭借高度拓展性快速崛起，而 iMac 定位逐渐向基础使用收拢。

专业需求的转移，让 iMac 的「高配」之路戛然而止，但这并不是一件坏事，各司其职，才能为用户提供更精准的选择。

褪去了「束缚」的 iMac，比历史上任何时期都更接近诞生时的定位——凭借设计与性能的平衡，让人们乐于在日常生活中使用它。

就像 2021 年，颜色再次回归 iMac 时，库克说的那样：

iMac 是让人们感到快乐、充满灵感的设备。

这与 iMac 诞生时，乔布斯的愿景一脉相承。

又何尝不是一种历久弥新呢？

#欢迎关注爱范儿官方微信公众号：爱范儿（微信号：ifanr），更多精彩内容第一时间为您奉上。

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One important staple crop has been largely forgotten from both agricultural and rural history: the humble potato. First imported from South America to Europe in the latter half of the sixteenth century, for the first couple of centuries it was considered exotic eating. It quietly became increasingly important during the eighteenth century, and is now widely credited as the food that enabled the population boom in much of Europe in the nineteenth century.

For several years from 1845, a fungus-like organism late blight caused widespread crop failure in the poorer parts of Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere, causing the Great Irish Famine, with at least a million dying from starvation.

The potato is unusual for storing large amounts of starch in its tuber. Although starch is only about one fifth of the potato by weight, the remainder being water, it came be the staple food for much of the working population, in both country and city. Overton has calculated using estimated crop yields from the early nineteenth century that an acre of potatoes would have provided about 2.5 times as many calories as an acre of wheat.

Like wheat, growing potatoes is a process of amplification. Tubers from the previous crop are sown in the ground, and multiply to yield many times the weight originally sown. Production is thus not dependent on conventional seed, but on seed potatoes with a more limited life. If a whole crop is destroyed by blight, not only is there nothing to eat that year, but the seed potatoes for the following year are also lost. Blight remains in the soil, and once affected that land has to be used for crops other than potatoes.

However, potatoes had other advantages in a war-torn and taxed Europe. While troops rampaging in foreign countryside would often raid or burn fields of grain, damaging or stealing potatoes proved more resistant to invaders. They were also likely to escape taxes or charges levied on other arable crops.

During the eighteenth century, labourers fortunate enough to have a little land they could farm for themselves started to grow potatoes, to supplement their limited diet. Small potato patches sprung up in the countryside, and around towns. Production at scale remained unusual until the following century, when some English counties including Lancashire and Middlesex devoted significant areas to supply the growing cities. That in turn depended on transport such as canals and then railways to deliver sacks of potatoes to urban consumers.

When Vincent van Gogh was living in Borinage in Belgium, he was among labourers whose staple food was potatoes, in one of the areas that had grown them for longer than most. His Still Life with Potatoes, painted in September 1885, is his tribute to the humble vegetable.

Potato production was painted extensively by social realists including Jean-François Millet, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Millet shows this back-breaking work in his Potato Planters from about 1861.

The Potato Harvest from 1855 is another more substantial work developed from Millet’s drawings. In the foreground, a man and woman are working together to fill sacks with the harvested potatoes, to be loaded onto the wagon behind them. The other four work as a team to lift the potatoes using forks and transfer them into wicker baskets, a gruelling task. Although the fields in the left distance are lit by sunshine, the dark scud-clouds of a heavy shower fill the sky at the right. Being poor, none of the workers has any wet-weather gear. The soil is also poor, full of stones, and yields would have been low despite the full sacks shown at the right.

Millet’s most famous single work, The Angelus, was completed around 1857-59. This had been commissioned by the American collector Thomas Gold Appleton, as Prayer for the Potato Crop, but underwent modification before Millet renamed it. At some stage, it’s thought to have included a child’s coffin, but that was overpainted.

It shows a couple, praying the Angelus devotion normally said at six o’clock in the evening, over the potatoes they have been harvesting. It’s dusk, and as the last light of the day fades in the sky, the bell in the distant church is ringing to mark the end of work, and the start of the evening. Next to the man is the fork he has been using to lift potatoes from the poor, stony soil; his wife has been collecting them in a wicker basket, now resting at her feet. Behind them is a basic wheelbarrow with a couple of sacks of potatoes on it, ready to be taken home.

Twenty years later, Jules Bastien-Lepage painted what’s now sometimes known as October or Potato Gatherers (1878), but was originally shown as October: Potato Gatherers.

Vincent van Gogh painted Woman Lifting Potatoes (1885) and similar scenes during his time living with his parents in Nuenen, in North Brabant, the Netherlands.

János Pentelei Molnár’s The Potato Harvest from 1901 takes this theme into the early years of the twentieth century, in Hungary.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s A Man Digging Potatoes from 1901 is pure social realism, as this smallholder uses his spade to lift the potatoes that are his staple diet. I believe that the plants shown here have suffered from potato blight, which also swept Europe periodically causing more famine and death.

Although the girls shown in Léon Frédéric’s Three Sisters from 1896 are clean and well dressed, they’re sat together peeling their staple diet of potatoes in a plain and barren farmhouse. A glimpse of the shoes of the girl at the left confirms that they’re neither destitute nor affluent.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) is another revealing insight into the lives of poor labourers in Nuenen, who are about to feast on a large dish of potatoes under the light of an oil lamp.

Émile Friant’s The Frugal Meal (1894) continues the social theme, as a poor family with four daughters sits down to a meal consisting of a bowl piled high with potatoes, and nothing else. More worryingly, the pot on the floor at the left is empty.

Further reading

Christopher Shepherd’s brilliant essay on the history of the potato in The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History (2024), ed. Jeannie Whayne, Oxford UP, ISBN 978 0 19 092416 4.

Are the vibes good? These tracks by Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Roy Ayers and others, chosen by 12 musicians and writers, should convince you.

This article describes one change that has caught out some using macOS Sequoia, and considers what has changed in Sequoia Virtual Machines (VMs).

periodic has been removed

After many years of deprecation, the periodic scheduled maintenance command tool has been removed from macOS 15.0. In its heyday, periodic was responsible for running daily, weekly and monthly maintenance and housekeeping schedules including rolling the system logs. Over that time, macOS has been given other means for achieving similar ends. For example, logs are now maintained constantly by the logd service, and aren’t retained by age, but to keep the total size of log files fairly constant. I don’t think that Sonoma performed any routine maintenance using periodic.

If you use periodic, then the best option is to use launchd with a LaunchAgent or LaunchDaemon. If you’d prefer to use cron, that’s still available but is disabled in macOS standard configuration.

Sequoia VMs: AI

Sequoia VMs created from an IPSW image of Sequoia (rather than upgraded from Sonoma or earlier) running on Sequoia hosts are the first to gain access to iCloud features. Now that 15.1 has been released with AI, I’ve been trying to discover whether that can also be used in a VM. So far, my 15.1 VM has sat for hours ‘preparing’, but AI still hasn’t activated on it. I suspect that, for the present, AI isn’t available to VMs. If you have had success, please let me know.

Sequoia VMs: macOS builds

My test 15.1 VM has also behaved strangely. It was originally created in 15.0, updated successfully to 15.0.1, then to 15.1, where it was running build 24B83, the version released generally on 28 October. Later that week Software Update reported that a macOS update was available, and that turned out to be a full install of 15.1 build 24B2083, released on 30 October for the new M4 Macs. This VM is hosted on a Studio M1 Max!

Installation completed normally, and that VM now seems to be running the new build perfectly happily, although it hasn’t proved any help in activating AI.

Don’t be surprised if your 15.1 build 24B83 VMs behave similarly. If anyone can suggest why that occurred I’d be interested to know, as it’s generally believed that build 24B2083 has been forked to support only M4 models.

Out from under an imposing shadow, she recorded four albums as a singer and had two R&B hits before turning her focus to her brother’s legacy.

© Tom Jamieson for The New York Times