Macintosh 128K
Apple
The original. A screen, a mouse, and a smile on boot. The 1984 moment computers stopped being for engineers and started being for everyone.
The Museum
A museum of beautiful machines. Online, for now.
An online collection of the computers, players, and radios that changed how technology looks, sounds, and feels. New exhibits are added one machine at a time.
Where it started
Before I ever shipped an app, I was the kid taking machines apart to see why they felt the way they did.
Some machines are just tools. Others change what people expect technology to be - how it should look, how it should sound when it clicks, how it should make you feel when you use it. Those are the ones I can't stop collecting notes on: the Macs, the iPods, the Bang & Olufsen pieces that treated electronics as furniture, as sculpture, as something worth keeping for forty years.
This is my editorial museum of those machines. Each exhibit earns its place because it is important, beautiful, or genuinely cool.
Exhibits
The current collection of ideas.
Apple
Newton MessagePad
Apple
A commercial failure and a conceptual triumph. Everything the iPhone became was sketched here first, fourteen years too early.
iMac G3
Apple
Bondi Blue translucent plastic that saved Apple. It made the internet feel friendly and computers worth putting in the living room.
Apple Cinema Display
Apple
Twenty-two widescreen inches floating on a clear easel while the world still ran on beige CRTs. It made the display part of the design, not an afterthought.
Power Mac G4 Cube
Apple
Eight inches of computer suspended in acrylic, cooled by convection, silent by design. A commercial flop that lives in MoMA. Apple at its most uncompromising.
iPod (1st generation)
Apple
A thousand songs in your pocket and a scroll wheel that felt like magic. The moment Apple learned it could change industries beyond computing.
iPhone 2G
Apple
The keynote, the pinch-to-zoom, the aluminium back. The single most influential consumer product of the century so far.
Bang & Olufsen
Beogram 4000
Bang & Olufsen
Jacob Jensen's tangential-tracking turntable, a record player that moves like a precision instrument. In MoMA's collection for a reason.
BeoLab 8000
Bang & Olufsen
A pencil-slim aluminium column that made loudspeakers disappear into the room. David Lewis proved hi-fi could stand like sculpture. It stayed in the range for nearly twenty years.
BeoSound 9000
Bang & Olufsen
Six CDs behind glass and a laser that glides between them. Half hi-fi, half kinetic sculpture. The CD era at its most confident.
BeoCom 2
Bang & Olufsen
The "banana phone", a handset pressed from a single curve of aluminium. David Lewis took the most ordinary object in the house and made it worth leaving out on the table.
The dream
Today the museum lives here, online.
I want this to become a pop-up exhibition, then a permanent technology museum in the West of Ireland. Until then, I will keep building the collection here.
Photo credits
- Macintosh 128K, Photo: Grm wnr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Newton MessagePad, Photo: Rama & Musée Bolo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR
- iMac G3, Photo: Rama / David Fuchs via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Apple Cinema Display, Photo: Apple
- Power Mac G4 Cube, Photo: Apple
- iPod (1st generation), Photo: Miguelon756-5303 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- iPhone 2G, Photo: Apple
- Beogram 4000, Photo: Bang & Olufsen
- BeoLab 8000, Photo: Bang & Olufsen
- BeoSound 9000, Photo: Bang & Olufsen
- BeoCom 2, Photo: Bang & Olufsen
Some classics are still worth buying.
Shop with Alex takes the same eye for design and applies it to products you can buy now.