Absent from the shelves of John Nugent’s garage are paint cans, ladders, and gardening tools. Instead, the longtime collector of pocketknives and watches has a chronological arrangement of Macs — computers from Apple, a company well known for other technological successes such as a music device, the iPod, and a smartphone, the iPhone. Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary credited for much of the company’s success, unveiled his newest buzzworthy item earlier this year, and the device reached consumers’ hands — and Nugent’s — in April: the iPad, a thin tablet computer with a 9.7-inch touchscreen and thousands of available apps.
With a variety of laptops and desktops, Nugent’s Mac mania kicked into full throttle three years ago when a friend showed him a Mac SE, a 1987 model with a 20-megabyte hard drive, an eight-megahertz processor, and two slots for the popular 1980s storage device: floppy disks. Nugent, an independent commercial real estate professional, felt nostalgic about the computer’s boxy look, a contrast to today’s thin-screened iMacs. Those big, square floppy disks? Obsolete. On the new Macs, SuperDrives — capable of reading and writing DVDs and CDs — are the latest trend.
Memory storage is great, but Nugent loves the Macs’ computing power. When he ditched PCs for good, “I thought, ‘To hell with it. I will no longer deal with this virus protection,’” says Nugent. He committed to Macs, known for durability against the computer virus problems that plague PCs. “When I dove,” he says, “I dove deep.” From the oldest (the Mac SE) to the newest (a 27-inch iMac i7), his collection now includes 31 Macs. “I just like them and have a passion for them,” says Nugent, who calls his garage his “Mac Museum” and frequently writes about it on his Facebook page. “I like that it shows the history of the company, and they’re just fun.”
