Accomplished photographers tend to bristle when asked to talk about equipment. It’s not the camera that makes the picture, it’s the photographer.
Acclaimed photographer Richard Koci Hernandez would tend to agree, but he’s likely to gush about his camera anyway. That’s because some of the most interesting and satisfying work of his career has come from shooting with his iPhone.
The kind of gear that once helped Hernandez garner Pulitzer Prize nominations now rests idly in a camera bag.
Television and cinema have mostly failed in presenting a Steve Jobs story that earns the approval of knowledgeable Apple fans.
Now it’s opera’s turn to make something compelling.
Varun Shenoy is so busy with high school clubs that require him to keep on top of current events, he has no time to do the reading to keep up with the news.
So Shenoy came up with a solution, an iOS app with a language-based algorithm that distills the essence of news stories and presents the user with quick summaries. His app, Summit, earned him a highly coveted young developers scholarship to next week’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
If you like how your Mac keyboard feels to the touch, you may like the way some of the keys look and feel as wearable art.
Pennsylvania artist Stacey Peterson salvages the keys and even the power button to make necklaces, cufflinks, and other wearable keyboard pieces that she sells to eager Apple fans on her Etsy site. In most cases, the key or power button engages in that satisfying click.
While Apple continues to produce desirable electronic devices, other support industries have emerged to provide cases, sleeves, and peripheral hardware accessories. Like the T-shirt or toymakers who celebrate Apple culture, Peterson is part of a cottage industry that engages the Apple fan’s emotional motherboard, the circuits that spark that loyalty, nostalgia and a sense of coolness.
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.
Two dating Mac geeks set a gift ground rule one Christmas: presents must be handmade.
Roberto Hoyos, with the ability to sew in his DNA, crafted seven throw pillows in the shape of the Mac OS X icons. The Apple fan couple is no longer an item — but the pillows are.
Parry Gripp was the lead vocalist of a promising pop punk band that had a record deal and stardom just around the corner.
Success never came and just as Parry Gripp was set to give up, a new career in music rose from the ashes — by accident — thanks to the iPhone and Apple.
The technology company was not only fodder for Gripp’s brand of absurd novelty music he was creating but, through iTunes, Apple provided a way for him to publish his music and start to make a living.
Apple fans felt a deep sense of mourning in 2011 when Apple founder Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer. With the fifth anniversary of his passing approaching, Cult of Mac looks at the artistic tributes that followed.
The Tumblr bio of Hong Kong graphic artist Jonathan Mak Long reads, “I try to do good work, and the world agrees on occasions.”
The death of Steve Jobs was one such occasion. Within hours of the news, grieving Apple fans across the world took comfort in an image created by the then-teenaged college student of a silhouetted Jobs in the bite of the Apple logo.
Apple fans felt a deep sense of mourning in 2011 when Apple founder Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer. With the fifth anniversary of his passing approaching, Cult of Mac looks at the artistic tributes that followed.
If the wrinkles and curves on a person’s face tell a story, Dylan Roscover will find the right words to narrate each and every line.
The commercial artist from Boulder, Colo., used the messaging from Apple’s “Here’s to the crazy ones” television commercial from 1997 to create a portrait of the embodiment of misfit genius, Steve Jobs.
He has been described as the “sickest drummer in metal right now” with the speed, muscle and snap to become a legend — a legend on the iPad, that is.
This self-styled musician and Apple fanboy from Japan has raised eyebrows for furiously finger tapping through a catalog of rock drum solos, using the virtual rock kit on Garageband with eye-popping dexterity with a well-viewed YouTube channel as his stage.
Steve Jobs left a lasting impression on Hungarian software developer Gabor Bojar when the two met in 1984.
Today that impression stands more than 7-feet tall, in jeans and mock-neck shirt, of course, cast in bronze outside of Bojar’s firm in Budapest.
Apple fans felt a deep sense of mourning in 2011 when Apple founder Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer. With the fifth anniversary of his passing approaching, Cult of Mac looks at the artistic tributes that followed.
Artist Jason Mercier is yet another creative person to use Apple devices — and maybe the only one to literally break them into pieces for his work.
Mercier has made a name for himself around the San Francisco Bay Area by creating mosaics with trash befitting his celebrity subjects. So when his cousin commissioned him to do a portrait of the late Apple founder, Mercier knew he had to construct it with the very products and components Jobs had a hand in creating.
Apple fans felt a deep sense of mourning in 2011 when Apple founder Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer. With the fifth anniversary of his passing approaching, Cult of Mac looks at the artistic tributes that followed.
From afar, the colorful portrait of a smiling Steve Jobs looks like a pixilated portrait made with an early digital camera. Get closer and those pixels take on a shape familiar to your thumb and forefinger — bubble wrap.
Jobs would appreciate Bradley Hart’s “Think Different” approach to bubble wrap as well as the hyper-focus attention Hart pays to inject each bubble with a different color of acrylic paint to form a famous face.
Apple fans felt a deep sense of mourning in 2011 when Apple founder Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer. With the fifth anniversary of his passing approaching, Cult of Mac looks at the artistic tributes that followed.
Nothing grants a person supreme being status like a tattoo. After all, the ink is permanent.
So even if the late Steve Jobs had a well-established legacy as the father of personal computing, some Apple fans felt the need to wear their devotion more deeply.
Nick Wellings listens to music on his iPhone, preferring not to disturb any one of his 108 iPods.
He figures his collection would hold 231,000 songs, but only one has ever been touched or seen the light of day. They remain factory-sealed in their boxes.
The iPod’s status as an icon was brief but seismic, a sleek and at-times-colorful trigger of upheaval to the music industry in the middle of the century’s first decade. Soon the iPhone, which grew more powerful with each generation, relegated the iPod to junk drawers, closets and boxes, next to that cassette-tape-playing Sony Walkman.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tim Cook, Jony Ive and Apple’s legendary Steves earned their loyal followings.
Writer Gary Allen made sure the foot soldiers — Apple retail workers and even the carpenters who made display tables for Apple Stores — got props for their contributions to Cupertino by way of Allen’s now-defunct website ifo Apple Store.
In doing so, Allen left his own thankful and devoted followers saddened when he passed away last fall from brain cancer.
The lines outside Apple Stores across the globe will be long later this year when the much-anticipated iPhone 7 goes on sale, a guaranteed media spectacle ripe with companies seeking inexpensive advertising of their products.
No guerrilla marketing stunt set the bar higher than one in Sydney last fall, when a telepresence robot with the cheerful face of a woman named Lucy framed in an iPad took her place in line to buy an iPhone 6s.
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.
