Rare customized Apple-1 to go up for auction, could top $500,000 in bids
An unusual Apple-1 will appear in a Christie's auction on June 15, special not just for being in working order, but for the customizations made by its initial owner.
The unit not only has a green metal casing, but 12 kilobytes of RAM -- three times the original amount, Christie's said. Also added is a 1702 EPROM (erasable programmable read-only memory) chip, which allows the computer to run programs immediately after booting instead of waiting for them to be shuttled into RAM.
The value of the machine is estimated between $300,000 and $500,000. Bidding could easily surpass that amount, given other auctions in recent years -- in 2014, another Apple-1 sold for $905,000. Back in 1976 the product sold for $666.66.
Only about 200 Apple-1s were ever built, assembled initially by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and others in Jobs's family home. Buyers were expected to supply their own casing, monitor, keyboard, and power supply, but even a pre-assembled motherboard was an advantage at the time.
Most Apple-1 units have since been destroyed, stopped working, or ended up in public collections, such as the Smithsonian Museum of Art. A quarter of the original 200 exist in any form.
The unit not only has a green metal casing, but 12 kilobytes of RAM -- three times the original amount, Christie's said. Also added is a 1702 EPROM (erasable programmable read-only memory) chip, which allows the computer to run programs immediately after booting instead of waiting for them to be shuttled into RAM.
The value of the machine is estimated between $300,000 and $500,000. Bidding could easily surpass that amount, given other auctions in recent years -- in 2014, another Apple-1 sold for $905,000. Back in 1976 the product sold for $666.66.
Only about 200 Apple-1s were ever built, assembled initially by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and others in Jobs's family home. Buyers were expected to supply their own casing, monitor, keyboard, and power supply, but even a pre-assembled motherboard was an advantage at the time.
Most Apple-1 units have since been destroyed, stopped working, or ended up in public collections, such as the Smithsonian Museum of Art. A quarter of the original 200 exist in any form.
Comments
$2,495 for the system (mac write & mac paint bundled)
$595 for imagewriter printer, $29 for the cable
I believe the external floppy drive was $495
box of 400k floppies: $50
external modem: $295
mac draw $195
mac project $195
canvas carry bag: $125
pride of ownership: priceless
it never failed to blow the mind of anyone who saw it running
And of course, at the time there was nothing, nothing like it. I can't recall how much I paid in early 1985. I think it was about AUD$2500
Actual when this was built and sold the whole idea it was design so that someone could do exactly this.
I am no expert on this, but it hard to say how much it would go for. It could depend on the history of this unit and who might have originally owned them and why the unit was used for. I think the one that sold for $900K also had all the documentation. Also not clear why the one from Germany sold for less.
not much I have one and no one seem to want them.
In a case like this, where the basic design is unchanged, but with a few fairly obvious hobbyist upgrades (more RAM, EPROM), it could go either way. Someone looking to own a museum piece may think it lowers the value. Someone who is more interested in bragging rights, and may actually turn it on from time to time, may find that these changes increase the value.
FWIW, I've a Mac SE at home. I've upgraded it several times over the years. The SE on my desk has two 1.44M floppy drives [i]and[/i] an internal 200M hard drive (upgraded from the original 30M drive.) It also has an internal Ethernet board (Asante MacCon SE+). Someone collecting Macs for a museum might consider my upgrades to be value-destroying. On the other hand, plenty of friends, upon seeing it, have said "that's really cool" and really like these upgrades. If it would ever go up for auction (assuming an SE would ever have collector's value), those upgrades might be good or bad depending on what kind of collector is in the audience.