A 45-year-old Apple computer, hand-built by company founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, was sold for $400,000 at an auction in the United States.
When the working Apple-1, the great-great-grandfather of today’s sleek chrome-and-glass Macbooks, went under the hammer in California, it was expected to fetch up to $600,000.
The “Chaffey College” Apple-1 is one of only 200 made by Jobs and Wozniak at the start of the company’s journey from garage start-up to $2 trillion megalith.
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The fact that the computer is encased in koa wood, a richly patinated wood native to Hawaii, adds to its rarity. This is how only a few of the original 200 were made.
Apple-1s were mostly sold as spare parts by Jobs and Wozniak. According to the auction house, one computer shop that received a delivery of around 50 units decided to encase some of them in wood.
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“This is kind of the holy grail for vintage electronics and computer tech collectors,” Apple-1 expert Corey Cohen told the Los Angeles Times in the lead-up to the bidding. “That really makes it exciting for a lot of people.”
The device, which was sold with a 1986 Panasonic video monitor, has only ever had two owners, according to John Moran Auctioneers. “It was originally purchased by an electronics professor at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California, who then sold it to his student in 1977,” a listing on the auction house’s website said.
The student, who has not been identified, reportedly paid only $650 for it at the time, according to the Los Angeles Times. While the $400,000 hammer price represents a good return on investment for that former student, it falls far short of the all-time high for such a machine. Bonhams sold a working Apple-1 for $900,000 in 2014.
“A lot of people just want to know what kind of a person collects Apple-1 computers and it’s not just people in the tech industry,” Cohen said.
Apple soared to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but faltered after Jobs and Wozniak left. In the late 1990s, the company was revived, and Jobs was reinstated as CEO. Before his death in 2011, he oversaw the launch of the iPod and, later, the game-changing iPhone.