Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

For Sale: Old Apple, Very Expensive

apple 1 christiesIn July 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started producing their first computer in Jobs’s parents’ house. The original list price: $666, which got you a preassembled motherboard but no casing, keyboard or monitor.

If you want to buy one today, you’ll need at least $300,000.

Jobs and Wozniak made about 200 Apple-1s, and in recent years some of them have been popping up in auction houses. The one pictured above sold for $212,000 via Christie’s auction house in November 2010, about 11 months before Jobs died.

Since then, the AP reports, prices have shot up dramatically, and buyers have spent as much as $671,000 for other units.

Christie’s has another Apple-1 coming on the market shortly, and has set the minimum bid at $300,000. If you’re in Silicon Valley, you can check it out for yourself, starting Monday, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

 

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik