Herman Miller ships new $1,600 Embody chair

The latest object of technophile lust is a sight to behold, with an exoskeleton climbing up its singular back and enough levers and knobs to land a Cessna. Herman Miller's much-anticipated office chair, the Embody (list price: $1,595), is finally rolling out this month. Six years and millions of dollars in the making, the Embody is ready to one-up its iconic predecessor, the Aeron, which in 1994 revolutionized the act of sitting down.

That is no easy task. The Aeron brilliantly anticipated the Digital Age by allowing workaholics to spend endless hours lashed to their computer screens without developing bedsores. With a mesh suspension system that conformed to a user's body shape, the Aeron generated more than $1.5 billion in revenue and looked so cool that it's still being used by Tina Fey on the sitcom 30 Rock and resides in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art.