Apple was a far smaller, less significant company in 2001. Much less chance that someone would go to the effort to make a fake employee 10 badge back then.
Calling Apple small and insignificant in 2001 is just…not factually accurate. As someone who lived through that time I don’t really know what the most useful citation to provide you would be. If you knew what a computer was, you knew what Apple was many times over, and how they were the revolutionary™ brand even back then. For goodness sake, 2001 is post-iMac by several years/generations.
Apple's perceived status was bigger in USA than elsewhere. Don't know about Germany, but in Poland Mac at the time was pretty much pigeonholed into few artistic endeavours[1] or DTP - you were most likely to see something Mac related because a publishing company preparing ads made a screenshot on a mac when trying to make and showing webpage in a web browser.
[1] And by 2001 was not that far from there being reasonable discussion whether you should not instead get an Atari ST if you wanted to do electronic music. (there was sorta ecosystem for ST as midi controller that was still surviving, at least in Poland, partially thanks to disco scene)
Back in 2003 I bought my first Mac, an PowerBook 12" which I love(d). Nobody else I knew had a Mac, only a professor at my university.
A few month later Apple released Mac OS X 10.3 „Panther“, to be sold still on DVDs in shrink-wrapped boxes. There was only one, small, store in my city which sold Apple stuff. Not an Apple Store, those are still very rare in Germany, but a chain local to Germany (which went out of business this year). For the release of Panther they made an evening party, for enthusiasts.
My city has a population of 0.5 million but it is part of a metropolitan region of 5 million people. That local shop would have been the shop for at least half of the region.
Including me there were less than 20 enthusiasts there that evening. You felt like a part of an obscure BDSM cult or something.
Apple in public opinion then was mostly inexistent in Germany. Partly because of the marketing incompetence of the Apple D-A-CH local organization, but also because Apple then had the image of a computer only for graphic designers with no practical usage for other computing and seen as hugely overpriced. Germany was and still is rather cheap in regard to computers. A big tech store chain at the time was using the slogan “Geiz ist geil” (“Parsimony is sexy”).
"Apple was a far smaller, less significant company in 2001" != "Apple were small and insignificant"
If you were into computers in 2001 you'd have heard of Apple, for the general population I'd bet a reasonable percentage would have had little knowledge of them then, and key to the argument here - far far less knowledge or interest than people would today.
Regardless of their significance at the time, there's no way a bit of Apple memorabilia would have commanded the same price or interest then as it would now. Be like selling an autographed John Oliver photo in 2005. He was hardly insignificant on the UK comedy scene at that time, he had a radio show, was on TV shows. But he was _far less significant_ than he is now
I owned a computer in 2001 in Germany and was at best vaguely aware Apple made computers. From 2001 onward they became known for making really good MP3 players though
> For goodness sake, 2001 is post-iMac by several years/generations
Oh come on, G3 is 1998, G4 is 2002.
No other objections though. My favourite anecdote about that time is what Sex in the City had a MacBook, specifically PowerBook G3, as, well, a solid part of the story and even had a dedicated episode!
