Five things you should know about St. Louis’ premier Apple enthusiast
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
When Jeremy Mehrle’s girlfriend told him to take pictures of his 78 Apple computers and post them online last fall—his wall o’ iMacs, the basement bar he made entirely of Apple Classics, hard-to-find pieces like the 20th-anniversary Mac—he rolled his eyes and gave in. Apparently, forecasting the viewing habits of Mac-obsessed Netizens is not one of Mr. Mehrle’s strong points: The digital snapshots of his massive collection—posted to Flickr in August—caught the attention of MacLife Magazine and a host of techie blogs last winter and turned him into a cyberspace celebrity. “These are the sites I go to every day, and I was on them,” the video editor and 3-D animator says. “It was cool.” “Cool” is a subjective term when it comes to your average basement-dwelling computer collector, but as we found out, Mehrle isn’t just another geek with a motherboard complex.
He’s a recent Apple convert. This obsession with all things Steve Jobs–ian is relatively new. Mehrle admits he was a “Microsoft apologist”—until he bought the original Macintosh, strictly for its historical significance. His PC-loving friends called him a sellout, but he persevered and started buying modern Apple computers. “They’re Mac evangelists now, too,” he says of his friends.
He’s got some style. His ultramod home in O’Fallon, Mo., isn’t exactly warm (girlfriend Katrina Bibb is working to tone down the 2001 motif), but its Eames- and Philippe Starck–inspired look is a heck of a lot hipper than that of most bachelor pads. “They have the coolest furniture in commercials, and I love that stuff,” he says. “I want to live that way.”
He shops to study. Despite what you may think, Mehrle isn’t collecting just for the sake of collecting. He used to buy IBMs, Tandys—even Atari computers—just to see how they worked. “If I knew someone else who collected computers that I could look at, I probably wouldn’t have as many.”
He’s a serial decorator. Mehrle doesn’t have to worry about moving around his artwork to switch things up. Those computer screens are animated canvases. “If I have a more upbeat party, I’ll loop in faster video,” he explains. “If it’s a relaxed party, I’ll put on something slower.” Last New Year’s Eve, his iMac wall sported revolving clips of boogieing bobby-soxers.
He’s a techno-sculptor. A stack of five TVs at the foot of Mehrle’s basement steps depicts a computer-animated, headphone-wearing, featureless, humanlike figure walking toward you, as if on an invisible treadmill. It’s just a little something Mehrle designed at work one day. “I wanted something interesting, and I don’t like plants—you have to water them.”
