I'm not sure it's warranted to call him a rich little snob. I read this article and one that it linked to, and it seems like he worked hard earning and saving money to build the collection. Maybe his parents are rich and are really the ones funding this but I didn't see anything to back that up.
No average 15-year old can “work hard” and simply “earn” the enormous gobs of money this kind of collection costs. Someone older who can be assumed to have worked their whole life and slowly accumulated a large collection, such a person have demonstrated dedication and sacrifice, which signifies genuine interest and love for the subject. But someone 15 years old? They must have simply bought it all, over a comparitively short period of time, for ungodly amounts of money. And when neither time, effort or sacrifice is involved, it’s very hard to trust the person to be genuinly interested.
Sure, they could still very well be genuinely interested and dedicated to the subject. But, while we normally can make the reasonable assumption that a person who owns a large collection necessarily is genuinely interested in the subject (per the above reasoning), in this case this reasoning is not valid. They still might be genuinely interested, but we have no way of knowing that.
"Alex said his first breakthrough was buying a collection of 50 Apple computers — enough to fill a 26-foot-long U-Haul — with $2,000 he had saved from mowing lawns."
"Alex described himself as a longtime tinkerer who studied how tractors worked at the John Deere dealership, explored the innards of computers ... He was inspired to pursue Apple computers after he upgraded the hard drive and RAM on his first computer, the iMac G5, on his own."
"Alex quickly discovered he could not tinker much with his G5 because it was already at its limit for upgrading. So he sought older Macs for sale to take them apart, get them working, and learn how they are put together."
Sure he’s interested – for the moment. It’s whether the interest will persist that we have no way of knowing. My point was that since he has done this for such a short time, the size of his collection can’t, as it normally would, indicate time spent and thus a larger than passing interest.
Also, my comment was to someone that seemed to claim that someone that young could simply “work hard” and earn the money. Now, unless you’re surrounded by people with way too much money than they know what to do with, this isn’t true.
> But someone 15 years old? They must have simply bought it all, over a comparitively short period of time, for ungodly amounts of money. And when neither time, effort or sacrifice is involved, it’s very hard to trust the person to be genuinly interested.
If they bought it for "ungodly amounts of money", doesn't that imply some sacrifice? I mean, presumably, they gave up whatever else they could have instead used those "ungodly amounts of money" for.
Possibly, yes. But I feel it unlikely that anyone who spends that much more or less at once doesn’t have a lot more where that came from. And sacrifice is not measured in raw dollar value, it’s measured in the hardship you have to endure due to the things you gave up. If someone ate porridge for two years, that’s a sacrifice. If someone sold their third house, that’s not a meaningful sacrifice, even if what they gave up – the use of a whole house – is comparatively larger.
As another poster pointed out, if you read the linked article or the CultOfMac article that it links to then it's clear that he is interested. And I don't see why you care that he make some meaningful sacrifice, or how you feel entitled to judge that off the tiny amount of information we have? From what I remember of being in my early teens saving $2000 from mowing lawns would have been a huge effort, regardless of whether my parents helped my hobby. Cut the kid some slack - he's making a public museum out his collection, after all.
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.
