15-Year-Old’s 200 Vintage Apple Computers Are Now a Mac Museum

My only point is that we can’t judge a person with this kind of collection by the size of the collection alone. The effort and dedication usually needed to amass such a large collection is what we really admire (or should, anyway), and the size of the collection is usually a proxy for that, so at first instinct, we are impressed by this person. But the size does not imply effort and dedication in this case, for two reasons: Firstly, he’s too young to have been doing this for very long, so we don’t know if this will simply be a passing fancy of his. (I’m not saying it will be, I’m saying that in this case we don’t know; unlike a normal aging collector which we can reasonably assume to have put in the years required for our admiration.) Secondly, as a consequence of the first, he must have bought it all relatively quickly, and we all know that when you want something fast, it’ll cost you. Also, things like an Apple I don’t come cheap nowadays, no matter how many years you spend roaming flea markets looking for them. This suggests that he has a lot of money – much more than the average adult, even – which in turn suggests that he hasn’t made any significant monetary sacrifice in acquiring the collection.

So, we can reasonably deduce that he hasn’t spent much time, effort or money (for him, anyway) on this collection, at least compared to the usual collector with a comparable collection. Therefore, we can’t say anything about his dedication to and interest in this subject, because the collection alone does not demonstrate it.

I am not trying to denigrate him – I am simply not impressed by him yet.