Photo by Carmen Troesser
At 16, Jeremy Mehrle was the kind of kid who all the neighbors called on when they needed help setting up their new computers, and when they no longer had any use for the outdated models they had just replaced, Mehrle gladly took them home.
“It wasn’t until the year 2000 that I began to actively collect what I actually wanted,” says Mehrle, 39, a video editor who travels the world shooting documentaries.
Mehrle says he never planned to amass so many computers, but his ease with technology at the advent of home computing transformed him from troubleshooter to collector.
Today, his Soulard row house—built in 2007 to resemble a late-1800s home—is half home, half Mac museum, with a few weekends a month reserved for Airbnb guests.
At its peak, Mehrle’s collection featured 160 computers, including every machine from the original iMac to the Apple II computer in vintage years ’77, ’78 and ’79; the Lisa, released in 1983; and the collector’s edition Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, or TAM, that in 1997 was delivered to the buyer’s home by limousine for the sum of $10,000.
The idea was to draw attention to Apple’s history through his collection, but Mehrle quickly realized that he wasn’t getting the reaction he hoped for from friends and family.
“They were basically, like, ‘Oh, that’s cool’—and that’s about it.” So he studied Apple’s aesthetics and decided to place the emphasis on design rather than on history.
“The oversized wooden tables in the Apple stores aren’t tied to the form of the computer,” says Mehrle, “so the style of the computers can change and the design of the stores still fit,” he says. “I think that’s brilliant.”
With that in mind, Mehrle built a wall unit in his home’s entry that showcases 12 iMacs in every color produced. With the help of a 3-D application to design the unit, he created a layout with three rows of shelves holding four computers each.
“Less shelves, more art—like you’d see in a museum,” he says.
Photo by Carmen Troesser
Photo by Carmen Troesser
Photo by Carmen Troesser
Photo by Carmen Troesser
The room’s coffee table features a glass top and a base comprising the original “five flavors of iMac,” with a screen saver running on each. “When people ask, I’ll take the computers out and play with them. I want this to be interactive,” he says.
The museum also includes a library with such books such as The Cult of Mac, Inside Steve’s Brain, and Designed by Apple in California; a collection of the posters that once came packaged with each computer; and a basement teeming with still more technology—eMacs too many to count, Power Mac Gs, Mac Pros, various laptop models, and the Apple IIc and IIGS—plus stacks of software, keyboards, monitors, and towers.
Recently, Mehrle decided to pare down his collection to about 80 working computers and sell the rarer models.
“I was getting nervous that the next time I turned them on would be the last,” he says.
Still, a display is in the works for his bedroom: “I haven’t settled on it, but maybe something with old mice, or old iPods, or the G4 Cubes, which bombed because they cost too much.”
Despite the collection, Mehrle relies most on Apple’s smallest gadget: the Apple Watch, which he says he mostly uses to text. For that, he says, it’s “invaluable.”
