| Cult of Mac

Hacker revives dead devices with iPhone and Apple Watch

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Mac keyboard and mouse running an iPhone
Tap through your iPhone, 1980s-style, with a vintage Mac keyboard.
Photo: Niles Mitchell/YouTube

The living can communicate with the dead — and Niles Mitchell regularly holds seances on YouTube to prove it.

Mitchell is a true medium, putting contemporary technology like the iPhone or Apple Watch in touch with obsolete hardware. He connects the two worlds and gets devices, old and new, to work together in ways likely never imagined by their creators.

Bidding for rare Mac prototype starts at 99 cents

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Hap Plain
This early backlit Mac laptop sold on eBay for more than $16,000.
Photo: Hap Plain

A rare Macintosh prototype that was once rescued from the trash recently sold for more than $10,000 on eBay.

But the winning bidder backed out and now, the clear-plastic Macintosh Portable M5126 laptop is back on the auction site. Bidding started at 99 cents with no reserve.

See extremely rare iPhone prototypes in action

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iPhone prototypes
These prototypes show some of the early steps Apple took in developing the revolutionary iPhone.
Photo: Hap Plain

iPhone turns 10 Apple collector Hap Plain can observe the iPhone’s 10th anniversary today by powering up two extremely rare iPhone prototypes — and you can see them in action, too.

The prototypes, which likely passed through the hands of Apple execs including Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall, offer a unique glimpse at iPhone development. You can see Plain fire them up in the video below, the latest entry in Cult of Mac’s collaboration with Wired UK to recap a decade of the iPhone.

iPhone collection makes perfect birthday gift for Apple-loving CEO

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iPhones at MacPaw museum
A collection of iPhones, presented as a 30th birthday present to MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan, fills a critical hole in his private Apple museum.
Photo: MacPaw

iPhone turns 10 Buying a birthday present for your boss can seem impossible. But the friends and co-workers of MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan — a diehard Apple fan — saw an opening after he bought a treasure trove of vintage Macs to create a museum at his company’s headquarters.

MacPaw’s mini Apple museum, filled with vintage gear auctioned off by fabled Apple repair shop Tekserve, contained no iPhones. Leaving out the smartphone that changed the world seemed like a glaring hole in a collection that otherwise did a good job of showing Apple’s role in revolutionizing personal computing.

Money to burn? Buy an original iPhone for $20,000

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2G iPhone on eBay
A 2G iPhone never opened and under glass. How much would you pay?
Photo: Discount Depot/eBay

iPhone-turns-10 When the iPhone launched in 2007, the tech world went into conniptions about the device’s price tag. At a time when carriers offered most cellphones for free, the iPhone’s $500 starting price seemed downright crazy.

Well, guess how much an original iPhone costs now?

For Apple collectors, pricing is a crapshoot

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Is it worth $3,000? How about $500?
Is it worth $3,000? How about $500?
Photo: garmont2222211/eBay

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.

Tekserve’s Apple artifacts wind up in Ukrainian museum

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MacPaw Apple museum

Photo: MacPaw

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.

This toy Mac built for dolls now runs Photoshop

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This tiny toy Mac runs Photoshop for work on tiny pictures.
This tiny Mac can run tiny Photoshop for work on tiny pictures.
Photo: Javier Rivera

Javier Rivera has a daughter, but the American Girl doll accessory he found on eBay was for him. It was a miniature Macintosh computer, a non-working toy for an 18-inch doll, and he had to have it.

The nerd in him believed he could make it run Photoshop.

Teen sells beloved Apple collection to keep museum dream alive

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Vintage tech collectors Lonnie Mimms, left, and Alex Jason pose with an Apple e-Mate prototype, part of a collection Alex sold to Mimms.
Vintage tech collectors Lonnie Mimms, left, and Alex Jason pose with an Apple e-Mate prototype, part of a collection Alex sold to Mimms.
Photo courtesy of Bill Jason

Alex Jason, the Maine teenager who used lawn-mowing money to build one of the most impressive collections of rare and historical Apple devices, recently packed it all in a 26-foot truck and made a heartbreaking trip to deliver it to a new owner.

The dream of creating a museum with the collection had hit a snag. Alex had the building and even an impressive board of directors that included Mac designer Jerry Manock. But raising capital to renovate the site proved near impossible in sparsely populated Maine.

Vintage Mac Museum steers clear of Macs that sucked

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Adam Rosen's Vintage Mac Museum
The Vintage Mac Museum heads west to Montana
Photo: Adam Rosen

Cult of Mac 2.0 bug Adam Rosen’s collection of vintage Macs doesn’t make him a hoarder, but he acknowledges it doesn’t make him an obvious choice for a husband, either.

In several rooms of Rosen’s Boston home you’ll find a love story nonetheless. The rooms are shrines to a high school sweetheart that matured and grew more sophisticated with time, a friendly face still aglow with “hello.”