The Apple tee-shirt retirement plan falls through

In the early days unique tee-shirts were standard issue at any Apple event, product release, or meeting.

I can remember going to sales conferences and having to buy a tote bag to bring back all the tee-shirts.

About ten years into my career, my wife tried to institute a rule of one tee shirt brought into the house required one tee shirt to leave the house.

That didn't work because I got attached to my tee-shirts.

When I worked in higher education we would create tee shirts for each campus.  That meant you could have dozens of tee shirts during one summer.

For a brief moment today when I was cleaning out my tee shirt horde, I dreamed of making some extra retirement money out of my valued shirts, many of which were never even worn since there were so many.

Then my wife got on eBay and found plenty of Apple tee-shirts for sale, but almost no bids on them. That burst my bubble pretty quickly.

Perhaps you had to have taken an extra dose of the Apple Koolaide to really love the tee-shirts.  I thought they were great and a really fun part of the company until there only black ones.

After figuring out that the tee-shirts weren't going to help my IRA, we packed them up and called the local Mac User group.

The head of the group was really excited to get them.  If nothing else he thought it would a real trip down memory lane for some of the users who had been around a long time.

I guess it could be a history lesson for the new users. 

I kept a few of my absolute favorites like my "Moof" shirt which is at our other house and my PowerPC shirt which is one of the ones in the web gallery of tee shirt photos that I created.

I wonder how many of you remember eWorld and actually used it?

Comments

[Erik Akerblom]

I was an eWorld beta tester and had a number of those shirts. I believe I literally had the last laugh when it went dark. I was in the main chat room lobby and said lol and then it went dark.

My apple t-shirt collection went away a few years back. I wish I still had some of them...

erik9999 or erik99 at eWorld

[Peter]

Ah...memories...

I recently discovered a shirt (not a T-shirt) in my closet from WWDC 1991. I sent it in to be carefully cleaned (versus my usual "Eh, just throw it in the wash") and wore it at the last WWDC. Got a few, "Oh! I remember that one!" comments.

[Alan]

I used it - on my Newton OMP, connecting via the cigarette-box Newton Modem, no less!

[John]

After the jumbled mess that was Compuserve, eWorld seemed wonderful at he time.

As for T-shirts, I leave wearing them to my wife, no matter what the logo of slogan, they look so much better on the ladies.