How an 88-year-old Japanese drip lord sent us on a rare Apple-tee quest

Feat. a grail-tier G4 Cube shirt

We know only 3 things about Hironobu-san, a.k.a. @hokanobunobu on ig: 54k ppl follow him, he follows 0, and this MF IS A DAMN 88-YEAR-OLD DRIP PRIEST who’s been blessing our TL with heavy fits since we started following him last year.

One specific item in a recent Hironobu post caught our eye, though: The Power Mac G4 Cube t-shirt he’s rocking above center.

For mysterious reasons that maybe involve weird Mac stans or just boil down to “dopeness,” G4 Cube shirts turn out to cost a lot: Here’s an M asking $110, another one asking $162 and a L for the truly goofy price of $300.

Nonetheless, u gotta hand it to this shirt … typically when u think of “cool” vintage Apple merch it’s rainbow-colored, faintly kitsch ‘80s joints like the justifiably legendary Apple sneaker (or the recent Concepts / Mephisto homage)…

…or this legitimately tight ‘95 Macworld “Power to Crush the Other Kids” longsleeve…

…but the G4 Cube shirt “hits” the same way that Apple and the ghosts of Jim Henson, Martha Graham and Buckminster Fuller “think,” baby: different. It registers as simultaneously recent and distant, in a pleasantly paradoxical combination, and seeing it on hokanobunobu’s feed sent us on a hunt for more non-obvious ‘90s and ‘00s Apple heat.

We fux w/ all 3 of these OS X tees, which have wild & unaccountable disparities in price … faded leopardskin version, left, $45 here; “gel” logo, center, $55 here and $125 here; galactic sans-serif logo, right, an unbeatable $12 here and $9 here.

Meanwhile we just copped the paint-stained 10/10 graileroni bottom left, which has big “RISD senior show” energy — the pristine ones center and right are a nutty $300, here and here.

Check out this ‘96 Mission: Impossible tie-in w/ the sick surveillance-state-biometric-vibes on the verso, selling for $86 here…

Repping an operating system is funny no matter what, but props to the OS 7-era Cupertino marketing team for listing 7 other major historical 7s (we see u, “the 7 voyages of Sinbad”) on this excellent shirt, asking $130 here.

This Power Macintosh shirt is charmingly dweeby, with solid clip-art graphics — only $30 here. Meanwhile, the super-wavy ‘95 Tokyo Macworld Expo artifact on the right captures the fascinating, early-WIRED-magazine-looking-ass aesthetic overlap between ‘90s tech and psychedelia — asking $85 here.

And here are two more in that simple, Hironobu-approved early-‘00s sweet spot: a (crinkly, shrinkwrapped) clamshell-iBook tee — $100 here — and an unimprovable gel-logo Apple store joint, $40 here.

Real talk though, we might just cop a bricked-out G4 Cube and put it on a plinth in the BLACKBIRD SPYPLANE H.Q. lobby ??

-Check out Hironobu-san on Instagram here
-Bricked-out G4 cube currently at $40 here.

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