When former Apple design honcho Jony Ive released his super-premium Apple design book in 2016, a lot of folks thought it was an overpriced ego trip. After all, Designed by Apple in California went for $299 for the large size and $199 for the small size.
And now? Well, now you’d be lucky to get the fancy coffee-table books for dollar amounts in the high hundreds and low thousands.
Apple museums have popped up all over the world, but none with the quirky love that filled the rooms of Adam Rosen’s Massachusetts home. He passed away in August and grieving family and friends vowed to find a new place to plug in his self-made Vintage Mac Museum.
Rosen’s father, Robert, told Cult of Mac the family has donated his son’s collection of more than 100 working machines to the American Computer and Robotics Museum in Bozeman, Montana.
Adam Rosen was happiest standing over an old Mac computer, all pulled apart with wires sticking out and components scattered across his kitchen table.
Rosen knew this part of him might never land him a wife. Who could appreciate a home where each room was a gallery of old working Apple computers?
This private Vintage Mac Museum lost its devoted docent on Aug. 31 when Rosen, 53, died from pancreatic cancer.
The iPod was an instant classic — killed off in an instant by the iPhone.
But the iPod has a Dr. Frankenstein in Remy Sternbach. The San Diego tech repairman is determined to bring two to life each week with shiny new bodies, solid state drives, new high-capacity batteries and a full terabyte of storage.
What Sternbach has discovered is the obsolete hardware has an enduring cool.
“I know this is a niche market, but there are people who really like the iPod and like Apple nostalgia,” Sternbach told Cult of Mac. “We also get a lot of audiophiles and people who travel a lot to places with patchy cell service. They want their music.”
The lucky few who have heard the audio from Apple’s new HomePod say it’s spectacular. Does it sound as good as the Hi-Fi stereo boombox Apple made for the iPod?
One way to find out is to buy one currently on eBay – for $2,999.99.
When legendary Mac repair shop Tekserve closed its doors last summer in New York City, Apple fans of a certain age experienced two deaths.
They bade goodbye to the original Genius Bar, technicians that had been servicing their devices for nearly 30 years. Those fans would also never again stare at Tekserve’s impressive Apple computer artifact collection, which was quickly auctioned off to an unknown bidder for $47,000.
The collection returned to a museum display today, more than 4,600 miles away in the Ukraine. Its new home is at the headquarters of software developer MacPaw.
Serious Apple prototype collectors usually know exactly what they are looking for as they try to build a physical timeline of each distinct device ever made. A Holy Grail artifact would be an Apple I. Fewer than 50 are said to exist.
Hap Plain wants the pieces none of us, including him, have ever seen.
He is one of a very select subculture who search the world over for Apple prototypes. Before being polished into the personal computing icons of our lives, Apple computers, iPods, iPhones and other devices start out as crude, unfinished test models so glitches and user experience hangups can be identified and worked out before hitting the market.
Starting a collection of Apple’s past is relatively easy and often affordable. But once you get started and a pricey, rare object presents itself, will you be able to control yourself?
Here’s a list that will test whether you have the fever and an intense desire to hold personal computing history in your hands. It may also test your fiscal fitness.
A 10-year-old kid in Maine finds an iMac G5 on Craigslist and arranges to trade a minibike and a snowblower for it.
The computer was supposed to be for games and homework. It instead proved to be the first piece in what is becoming one of the most significant private collections of Apple devices in the United States.
For years, Apple has been under pressure to open an Apple museum. The company’s rich and storied past has its fans clamoring for a central repository of that history.
Word from the company: No. Apple’s leaders say they are more interested in the future than the past.
In fact, the most complete historical collection of all things Apple is nowhere near Cupertino. The serious Apple fan must travel to, of all places, Savona, Italy.
Phil Schiller says Apple is too busy “inventing the future” to “celebrate the past” by building a museum.
So if you are in search of history on the 40th anniversary of Apple’s founding, you might want to travel to Georgia. There, a guy named Lonnie Mimms has taken over an old CompUSA building and meticulously crafted a tangible timeline that would make Apple’s futurists — perhaps even Schiller — pause with nostalgia and pride.
One man’s astonishing collection of Apple gear is for sale on eBay right now, making an instant Mac museum just a click away for the right bidder. The auction starts at $100,000, with a Buy It Now price of $300,000 — a drop in the bucket for a certain CEO who’s on his way to the billionaire’s club.
“I would love for Tim Cook to buy it all,” said seller Steve “Mac” Abbott in an email to Cult of Mac running down his list of ideal buyers. “First it means he would want to display it, unlike Steve [Jobs], and that Apple would sponsor its own history…. Next would be a well-heeled Apple guy, and after that whoever can convince me that it can be seen. Then, ‘Show me the money.'”
