The Apple Museum is an ode to a company that doesn’t exist any more
There’ll probably never be another museum quite like the Apple Museum in Prague, which featured almost every Apple product ever made in pristine condition, before it closed in September 2020 after a dumbfounding dispute between its founders. The entirely unrelated Apple Museum in Utrecht doesn’t come close, not by a long shot, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t visit it.
Created by Ed Bindels, founder of Apple premium partner Amac and event space Liemès, it’s located in The Wall shopping centre, under… an Amac shop and Liemès. Utrecht might be one of the most cyclable cities on Earth, but The Wall is an 800-metre-long monster of a building that’s made for cars. You can get there by bicycle or bus, but you have to walk across the humongous car park to find the small stairs that lead to the museum desk.
You’re greeted by a Volkswagen Combi and an HP-65 calculator, a nod to the things that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had to sell to bootstrap Apple. The Apple Museum perpetuates the myth of the garage1, but i’m willing to look past it, because it makes for a delightful entrance. The first part of the exhibit follows a chronological thread from the Apple I to the Apple II, Lisa and Macintosh.
The museum would have been cool even if you could only see the machines — and what you can see is only a small part of the 5,000 samples they have in store. But you can actually use a few Apple IIs and Macintoshes! It was fun watching kids playing around with Through the Looking Glass and MacPaint. It brought back some fond memories of my own childhood, but unfortunately, it looks like i’m as bad at The Oregon Trail as i’ve ever been.
As a budding type designer who’s married to the daughter of a printmaker, i absolutely loved the rooms dedicated to the birth of desktop publishing and digital typesetting. I get the feeling that most people didn’t care that much about PostScript and Bézier curves, but it’s a part of computing history that should definitely not be glossed over. The sight of SyQuest and Zip drives sent shivers down my spine, though — there should be a trigger warning!
“The Grey Period” is the weakest part of the exhibit. “This collection frames the era accurately”, according to the curators, “not as a void, but as the pressure that made Apple’s later simplification feel revolutionary.” This is teleology at its worst. Why go through the trouble of creating a model of the Knowledge Navigator if you don’t explain how it prefigured hypertext, simulation software, video conferencing, real-time collaborative work, touch devices, foldable screens, speech recognition and even intelligent agents?
How can you exhibit the Macintosh Portable next to the first PowerBooks without explaining that Apple didn’t need Steve Jobs to invent the modern laptop? How can you talk about the Newton without talking about ARM? Why would you dedicate an entire wall to Robert Brunner, but not show the progression of Jony Ive’s first contributions, from the PowerBook 100 series to the TAM? Wouldn’t it have been better to illustrate Apple’s ill-fated ‘digital convergence’ strategy rather than plastering a slew of devices on the walls?
It’d have been the perfect segue to “The Matrix”, Steve Jobs’s famous 2×2 grid of products, which set up the discipline the ‘digital hub’ strategy — ‘digital convergence’ by another name — would later cash in on. As it stands, “The Grey Period” glosses over the true innovation that took place during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and conveniently ignores the blunders of the early years of Jobs’s return.
After going through the dark corridor featuring the “Think Different” posters, i was taken aback when i turned the corner and was faced with a floor-to-ceiling rainbow wall of polished iMac G3s. “Welcome back to the land of colour!”, a volunteer greeted us, and i was that close to shedding a tear. That display is simple, but mightily effective. From then on, the chronological thread frays into thematic strands. It’s the right move, but it’s also where things start to unravel.
The iPod and iPhone rooms don’t feel as momentous as they should be, the iPad is tucked in a corner, there are surprisingly few Macs from the last twenty years, and software is entirely absent2. My first instinct was to think that they rushed to open the museum on time for Apple’s fiftieth birthday and could restructure that part of the exhibit in the future — there’s more than enough room for that and for future products.
But the more i think about it, the more i feel that the thinning exhibit isn’t a flaw so much as an admission. There’s less story to tell once Apple stops being a choice and becomes a habit. This is a museum for a company that had to earn its place, and that company is now gone. I wouldn’t travel to Utrecht especially for the Apple Museum3, but if you’re in the Netherlands, i highly recommend taking the trip down memory lane.