Used computer $116,000, More than a decade ago, at a vintage computer fair in Silicon Valley, Dag Spicer had an opportunity to buy an original Apple-1 for $2,000. He passed. Any regrets? Not really, he said.
“Of course,” Mr. Spicer added, “I could have paid off my mortgage now with what it would be worth.”
Perhaps so. Last November, an Apple-1, also commonly known as the Apple I, sold for $640,000 at
an auction in Germany. That sale surpassed the previous record of
$374,500 set only five months earlier at Sotheby’s in New York.
The astronomical run-up in the price of the original Apple-1 machines —
made in 1976 and priced at $666.66 (about $2,700 in current dollars) —
is a story of the economics of scarcity and techno-fetishism, magnified
by the mystique surrounding Apple and its founders, as the company has
become one of the largest, most profitable corporations in the world.
The next test of the Apple-1 market comes on Saturday, at the same auction house in Cologne, Germany, where the record sale took place last November.
Even the auctioneer, Uwe Breker, expressed some surprise at the price
reached last fall. For this week’s auction, the reserve price — the
minimum sale price — is $116,000, and Mr. Breker conservatively
estimated the likely range from $260,000 to $400,000. “But we will see,”
he said.
The auction market for the vintage machines, experts say, is thin and
uncertain. For example, a nonworking Apple-1 failed to attract its
reserve price of just over $75,000 at an auction last year in London.
The record-setting auctions last year were of working originals, as is
the Apple-1 going under the gavel on Saturday.
The sky-high prices suggest irrational exuberance. But technology
historians say there is a rational appeal to possessing an Apple-1. “It
is Apple’s creation story, the physical artifact that traces this
incredible success to its origins,” said Mr. Spicer, a senior curator at
the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
The Apple-1, Mr. Spicer added, was instrumental in the early transition
in personal computing from its hobbyist roots to becoming a huge
commercial business. Others were there too, notably the MITS Altair,
which was introduced before the Apple-1, and was the first personal
computer that Microsoft’s founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, wrote
software for.
But Apple proved to be the enduring computer maker. And its founders
embodied the hobbyist-commercial shift. Stephen G. Wozniak was the
hardware-hacking engineer and Steven P. Jobs, who died in 2011 after a
battle with cancer, was the business visionary.
Apple-1’s are scarce. An estimated 175 to 200 were produced in the Jobs
family garage in Los Altos, Calif. Mike Willegal, who maintains an online registry of Apple-1’s,
has verified the existence of 46 of them. A software manager at Cisco,
Mr. Willegal observed that there was a technical nostalgia to the
Apple-1, recalling a simpler time in computing.
“No one understands a whole computer system anymore,” Mr. Willegal said.
“But Woz” — Mr. Wozniak’s nickname — “knew that board inside and out,
and some people do today.”
A computer motherboard with clusters of chips was all that the
bare-bones Apple-1 offered. Users had to supply their own keyboards,
monitors and power supplies. It had 4 kilobytes of memory; a basic
MacBook Air has more than a million times that. It could be used to run
primitive computer games and write simple programs.
The Apple-1 was a reputation-building entry, but it was the Apple II,
introduced a year later in 1977, that would sell in the millions and
establish the company’s business. When Mr. Wozniak was designing the
Apple II, he was also handling customer service for the Apple-1, a
distracting time drain.
After the Apple II went on sale, the company began an aggressive
trade-in program, offering Apple II’s and sometimes cash incentives in
exchange for Apple-1’s, said Bob Luther, who is writing a book on the
vintage machines, “The First Apple,” which he plans to self-publish,
with help from a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign.
Used computer $116,000 news via nytimes
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