Latest Apple-1 auction fetches surprisingly low $355,500

At a June 15 Christie's auction, a customized Apple-1 sold for $355,500 — skewing toward the low end of house estimates, and below all other auctions for working Apple-1 computers.

Christie's had estimated the computer's worth between $300,000 and $500,000. By contrast, winning bids for other Apple-1s in 2013 and 2014 reached $671,400 and $905,000, respectively. In 1976 Apple sold the product for $666.66.

It's not clear why the latest auction didn't generate as much interest as past sales, but it may be that bidders wanted a "pure" machine. The displayed unit was upgraded with a green case, an extra 8 kilobytes of RAM, and a 1702 EPROM chip, letting it run programs immediately after booting instead of waiting for them to enter RAM.

Only about 200 Apple-1s were made, first assembled by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and a few others in Jobs's family home. Buyers still had to find other key components on their own, such as a case, monitor, keyboard, and power supply — in that era of personal computing however, it was still rare to get a pre-assembled motherboard.

The company quickly dropped the machine after launching the Apple II in 1977, and since then most Apple-1s have been destroyed or stopped working on their own. Some of the surviving ones are in public collections, making the sale of a working, privately-owned system extremely rare.

13 Comments

JinTech 1054 comments · 9 Years

About 7 years ago

It seems like there is an auction for one of these every couple of weeks.

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

Troll response: Apple 1 auction prices falling. Apple is no longer innovating. Apple is doomed. Surface rulez!

thompr 1521 comments · 16 Years

AppleInsider said:

It's not clear why the latest auction didn't generate as much interest as past sales, but it may be that bidders wanted a "pure" machine. The displayed unit was upgraded with a green case, an extra 8 kilobytes of RAM, and a 1702 EPROM chip, letting it run programs immediately after booting instead of waiting for them to enter RAM.

I think it's fairly clear that the modification of a vintage machine would decrease its value at auction.

Soli 9981 comments · 9 Years

lkrupp said:

Troll response: Apple 1 auction prices falling. Apple is no longer innovating. Apple is doomed. Surface rulez!

I wonder what the iFixit repairability score would be. They gave the Surface laptop a 0/10 because it's all soldered and glue. The only Apple product to get a 0/10 sis the AirPod, which makes sense considering its size.

EsquireCats 1268 comments · 8 Years

Soli said:

lkrupp said:

Troll response: Apple 1 auction prices falling. Apple is no longer innovating. Apple is doomed. Surface rulez!

I wonder what the iFixit repairability score would be. They gave the Surface laptop a 0/10 because it's all soldered and glue. The only Apple product to get a 0/10 sis the AirPod, which makes sense considering its size.

Despite how easy this machine is to modify, iFixit would not give it a perfect 10 because it doesn't involve their overpriced tools and suppliers, sorry I mean "requires soldering and non-standard parts". Let's be real: iFixit misrepresent the notion of repairing devices. Beyond a cracked screen, a consumer has no chance of diagnosing the source of hardware-borne malfunctions. Electronic devices are so well built that any act which causes an integrated circuit to malfunction has likely broken a range of components, writing off the device entirely. The idea of peeling open such a device to start swapping out components is utter nonsense.