See a Colorful Wall of Vintage iMacs and a Re-creation of Steve Jobs’ Garage at a New Apple Museum in the Netherlands

The tech world changed forever when two college dropouts founded Apple on April 1, 1976. Fifty years later, a museum dedicated to the company’s history and evolution has opened in the city of Utrecht

April 6, 2026

Apple I replica — A replica of the rare Apple I is on display at the museum. Apple Museum

Before it was a household name, Apple was a startup run by college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a suburban home in Los Altos, California. In honor of the tech giant’s 50-year anniversary, a new museum dedicated to Apple has opened in the Netherlands, tracing the company’s history from the Apple I to the iPhone.

Ed Bindels, the founder of the Apple Museum in Utrecht and owner of the Apple reseller Amac, is an enthusiastic collector of Apple products. Covering more than 17,000 square feet, the new museum isn’t affiliated with the company, but it’s billed as the largest Apple museum in Europe.

The attraction was designed to be an immersive experience for guests. Their visit starts in a re-creation of the storied garage often cited as the place where Apple Computer was founded five decades ago. But Wozniak’s version of this story is slightly different: Most of the company’s early operations happened in a bedroom at Jobs’ parents’ home in Los Altos, and the garage was only used when they ran out of room there.

“The garage is a bit of a myth,” Wozniak told Bloomberg’s Joshua Brustein and Katie Drummond in 2014. “We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there.”

Nonetheless, Bindels felt it was important to open the museum experience with this central piece of the brand’s mythology. “It tells a lot about the two people that founded Apple, what the basis is of their vision behind the products,” he tells the Associated Press.

From there, visitors can see rare Apple artifacts and models illustrating the company’s progression, starting with a replica of the 1976 Apple I that launched the company’s product line. The exposed motherboard—users had to supply the other components themselves—may not look like much to today’s smartphone users, but it was a major step toward bringing personal computing technologies into the average home.

Fun fact: The history of the Apple I

The Apple I was invented by Steve Wozniak, and around 200 were sold in 1976.
Less than half of them are known to survive—including one in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Original products on display include the Apple Lisa from 1983, a rainbow of iMac G3s from the late 1990s and early 2000s, and an early iPod. While the museum’s collection includes 5,000 items, just a fraction of them are currently on display. The objects in the exhibition were chosen carefully to bring the story of the company to life, starting with its humble beginnings in the 1970s, going through its successes and stumbling blocks in the 1980s and 1990s, and culminating with the iPhone in the 2000s.

“We don’t want to have the products as the main star,” Antonie de Kok, a member of the museum’s board, tells the AP. “They are here to tell the story. That’s why we select only a few items.”

Across the Atlantic, a different museum is hosting its own Apple exhibition in honor of the tech company’s 50-year anniversary. “iNSPIRE: 50 Years of Innovation From Apple” opened at the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art in Roswell, Georgia, on April 1. The show features more than 2,000 items that help tell the brand’s story. In addition to tech products, the museum displays other kinds of memorabilia as well, including the second check written to help build the company in 1973.

“Apple has not only survived [for 50 years], it has become one of the most influential and widely recognized companies in the world,” museum founder Lonnie Mimms tells Atlanta magazine’s Caroline Eubanks. “These artifacts tell the story of a small start-up that grew into a company that reshaped modern life.”

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