Functional Apple-1 In Rare Wooden Case Sells For Nearly Half A Million Dollars
A winning bidder just added a piece of Apple history to their collection for the cool sum of $475,000, besting the pre-auction estimate for an ultra-rare Apple-1 by $175,000. The final selling price includes a 25% "buyer's premium" fee that RR Auctions, the auction house that listed the fully functional Apple-1, adds to the hammer price.
Apple-1 boards are already few and far between in the grand scheme of things—estimates vary from a few dozen to a couple hundred being out in the wild. What made this particular one even more rare, however, is that it came housed in a wooden Byte Shop case. According to RR Auctions, only nine Apple-1 computers in Byte Shop's wooden case are known to exist.
The story behind the Apple-1 is that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak conceived a bare circuit board to be sold as a kit to hobbyists. Plans changed after Jobs approached Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, who agreed to purchased 50 Apple-1 computers but only if they came pre-assembled. Enter the wooden case, which proved pivotal in the Apple-1 becoming one of the first PCs to come fully assembled.
At the time, Terrell paid $500 each for the Apple-1 and then sold them at retail for $666.66. That was in 1976. Adjusted for inflation, that's a retail price of $3,849.94 today, compared to a wholesale price of $2,887.49, according to the CPI inflation calculator on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website.
This particular system is logged as #15 in the official Apple-1 Registry. According to the listing, it was obtained at an estate sale of June Blodgett Moore, the first female graduate of Stanford Law School, giving this Apple-1 another unique characteristic among the handful that still exist.
It was also recently restored to fully working order, in case the winning bidder cares to fire it up. There were actually some games released for the Apple-1 back in the day, such as Apple Star Trek and Lunar Lander, along with much later adaptations of titles like Oregon Trail.
While this Apple-1 auction is concluded, it's only a matter of time before there's another one, despite the rarity of these systems. It remains to be seen when or if one will top the $1 million mark. Back in 2022, an original Apple-1 prototype hand-soldered by Woz fetched $677,196 at auction. As far as we're aware, the record price for an Apple-1 is $945,000, set last year.
Images courtesy of RR Auctions
Images courtesy of RR Auctions
