Philip Lee makes toys that disrupt our logic boards with mushy feelings.
The Hong Kong designer, known for his cute Classicbots line inspired by classic Macs, will launch two new toys this year that should bring a twinkle to the Apple of your eye.
Soccer star Christiano Ronaldo is worth roughly $450 million. He has invested in a hotel chain, owns a $3 million sports car, lives in a $6 million house and has a lifetime deal with Nike worth a reported $1 billion.
But when it comes to listening to music, he’s fine with an iPod shuffle.
The Apple Watch is a modern timepiece that one company keeps turning into a time machine.
To elago, the watch display is the perfect inspiration for a series of charging stands made to look like vintage Apple products. It’s latest looks like the Classic iPod, complete with that iconic click wheel.
The new Apple Card may be titanium but it’s not the first Apple-issued plastic.
Some Twitter and Reddit users with amazing recall reacted to the news by posting ads from 1986 promoting two kinds of credit cards issued by Apple.
If you wait long enough to clean out a junk drawer or filing cabinet, you’re liable to find something historic.
In the case of graphic designer Greg Bridges of Sydney Australia, an old three-ring binder he stumbled across during a recent studio purge turned out to be an artifact from the early days of Apple.
We watch with both horror and fascination those videos where someone rips apart the latest Apple gadget to see how it is built.
But one member of the r/iPhone thread on Reddit took the dismantling of his iPhone 4 in a different direction: He artfully arranged the pieces for a framed keepsake.
Even amid the three-quarters of a million residents of Winnipeg, Canada, Rocky Bergen felt alone when it came to his love of vintage computers.
But thanks to his papercraft models of classic machines like the Apple II, Bergen has connected with folks in places as far away as Italy and Sweden.
Philip Lee is an ad man, a great admirer of vintage Macs and a lifelong collector of toy robots. From those three pieces of Lee’s life comes Classicbot, a line of designer toys that turns historic replica Apple hardware and desktop icons into adorable characters.
His first, the Classic, looks like the original Macintosh computer except with a friendly face, arms and legs. There’s even a cute mouse, a Font Suitcase that fits in the toy bot’s hand and a cardboard box reminiscent of the original packaging.
In order to appreciate one of Apple’s most successful products, the iPhone, you have to respect one of the company’s biggest failures. The QuickTake digital camera was not a threat to the camera market the way today’s iPhone is.
The sensor was 0.3 megapixels. Shaped like a set of binoculars, the QuickTake 100 could only hold eight pictures, most of which were fuzzy, washed out and with funky colors that convinced photographers of the time that film photography was not in danger.
But as the retro-computer YouTube channel, LGR, points out, the QuickTake does not deserve to be bashed as a failure. It should be lauded as a pioneer of digital photography.
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.
Jason Scott is an archivist and the enthusiasm for what he curates is the kind ascribed to 15th-century manuscripts or Jamestown colony artifacts – not software on obsolete floppy disks written for a 40-year-old computer system.
Scott is out to collect any original or copied software disks for the Apple II as if a language is in danger of dying with the people who speak it or possess some record of its existence.
Bidding for the extremely rare “Celebration Apple I” being auctioned by CharityBuzz closed today and while the lot failed to break the record for the most amount paid for an Apple I computer, the winning bid nearly topped $1 million dollars.
Apple famously wants no part in a museum dedicated to its revolutionary products. However, one key contributor to Apple’s early years feels differently — and is helping a Maine teenager elevate his basement computer collection into a thriving technology museum.
Jerry Manock, Apple’s first design guru, will serve on the board of directors for the future Maine Technology Museum, which will house the collection of 15-year-old Alex Jason, who has established what many serious collectors say is one of the best Apple collections anywhere.
An incredibly rare and unique Apple I computer is set to hit the auction block next week, and it could break the record for the most money ever paid for one of Jobs and Woz’s first computers.
CharityBuzz revealed today that it will auction off an original Apple 1, with 10 percent of the proceeds going to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Because the circuit board on the item up for auction is rare even among the 60 or so surviving Apple 1 computers left in existence, it could pull in more than $1 million.
Apple’s business model is based on the future, but sometimes a fan pines for the machine they had as a kid.
Self-taught hardware hacker and 3D printer artist Charles Mangin happily tries to satisfy those vintage tech longings by recreating pieces of Apple’s past in miniature. He even brings the screens to life — sort of.
The fun Jonathan Zufi had playing RobotWar on his high school’s lone Apple II in the early 1980s re-emerged one day. He just had to play it again.
The lark that led Zufi to an online search for an Apple II to play the game grew into the acquisition of more than 500 vintage Apple items, which he lovingly photographed, but then sold to fund production of a coffee table book that has sold more than 15,000 copies.
How far would you travel to see a collection of rare Apple devices, or the clothes Steve Jobs’ wore when introducing the iPad to the world?
Hopefully, the Czech Republic is not too far for you.
The newly opened Apple Museum in Prague is home to products and memorabilia from eight different private collectors. Its inventory might make the visitor think he’s strolling through some corporate archive in Cupertino.
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.
Grant Hutchinson has never owned an iPad. He does, however, own some 15-dozen Newton devices, a few of which he uses every day to help manage tasks, a schedule and software clients.
Why would Hutchinson cling to and even rely on a clunky obsolete digital message pad, an Apple failure so big it inspired f-bomb rage in Steve Jobs and a week’s worth of damning Doonesbury comic strips?
Hutchinson is just one of a few thousand people worldwide who collect and even use Apple’s first mobile computing device, discontinued in 1998 after a number of incarnations over a rocky five-year run.
Back in 1983, Apple took a retreat to La Playa Carmel, a popular Californian resort. During that retreat, Apple’s employees rioted, skinny dipping and drinking and throwing what was later called a “college beer bash.” As a result, Steve Jobs and co. were banned from La Playa Carmel forever. But La Playa Carmel has new owners now… and they’re ready to welcome Cupertino back with open arms.
If you love Woz (and who doesn’t?) we’ve got an extra special Friday treat for you.
Vince Patton emailed us, linking us to an incredible YouTube account filled with vintage videos of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak talking to the Denver Apple Pi computer club back in 1984, in which Woz talks about being put on probation for computer abuse, hacking a video-on-demand box for free movies at a hotel, and how Steve Jobs coerced him to quit his cushy job at HP to make a go for Apple.
Andrei Antonov is a huge Apple fan and has been an avid collector the last three decades. He’s got a certified crap-ton of old Apple machines, Newtons, Pippins, even random peripherals and Steve Jobs figurines. The guy has seriously got so much Apple stuff that he used it all to launch the Museum of Apple Technology where visitors can come in and actually touch the machines and play games like Prince of Persia and Mario on the oldest Macs you can find.
It’s an impressive collection to say the least, and some people think it might be the biggest collection of Apple hardware outside the U.S. Who are we to doubt them? Take a look at the pictures and see for yourself.
We don’t know where this came from.
We don’t know who made it (J.G. Thirlwell, perhaps?).
We don’t even know if there’s an iPad or iPad 2 ensconced within this case’s leathery, plush-lined folds.
We’d love to find out (tell us if you know), but until we do, mere ignorance will not stop us from posting this exquisite iPad Case, because all we can see is that gorgeously medieval gold emblem, showing Isaac Newton lazing under an apple tree, waiting for the full weight of gravity to come crashing down on his head. That was Apple’s original logo back in 1976.
From the Archive of Things People Hoped Were Lost, another forgotten Apple video has surfaced from 1984. Unlike the formidable 1984 TV commercial that introduced the Mac, We Are Apple (Leading the Way) was a fluffy dealer sales presentation that highlighted Apple’s growth and breadth in those halcyon days.
Apple had four product lines in 1984, the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa and Macintosh. All share the spotlight in this cheesy sales extravaganza. Sung to the tune of Irene Cara’s What a Feeling and presented in the lost art of the multi-image slide show, it’s hilarious. Who knew the Lisa was so portable – and such a babe magnet!
[via gajitz]
