Items tagged with auction
Way back in the day all anyone wanted for Christmas was a Nintendo Entertainment System. If you were lucky enough to get that NES, you undoubtedly wanted the Super Mario Bros. cartridge to go with it. Hoards of those video games were sold, and while we didn't know it at the time, the game would go on to be one of the most beloved video games ever made. While you could find the standard retail boxed version of Super Mario Bros. in just about any store that sold video games, there were a pair of incredibly rare versions of the game made. These versions are so rare because instead of being sealed in shrink wrap as the games usually were, there were sold in boxes sealed with a sticker. Only two of...
Read more...
Auction firm RR Auction made news in August as it was getting ready to auction off a very rare and valuable piece of computer history. That bit of history was one of the few remaining and fully functional Apple-1 computer systems built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. This particular machine was purchased by the original owner from The Byte Shop where the Apple-1 was sold for $666.66 back in the '70s. The original owner used the rig to learn BASIC programming and wrote small programs on it. The owner held onto the Apple-1 all these years because he felt it could be a piece of computing history one day. That reasoning has turned out to be valid with fewer than 70 Apple-1 computers thought to be...
Read more...
Apple is widely recognized these days as the most valuable company in the entire world, with a market cap of around $1 trillion. Think of Apple products today and what comes to mind are slickly designed MacBooks, iPhones, and iPods. The earliest beginnings of the company were set in motion by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak working out of a garage to build computers that looked more like science projects, versus what we expect from Apple today. Those earliest of machines back then were known Apple-1 computers that were built in the '70s and they certainly look far different than any current day modern PC. Only 200 of the Apple-1 machines were produced, and working examples are exceedingly...
Read more...
Back before the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) hand built and peddled an Apple-I system to a local computer store in Mountain View, California, there was a man named John Blankenbaker working in his garage in Los Angeles to create the Kenbak-1, an 8-bit machine with 256 bytes of memory.it was constructed in 1970 and went on sale in early 1971, making it the first commercially available personal computer, predating the Apple-I by five years. One of the most impressive things about the Kenbak-1 is that it was a fully assembled PC, whereas many PCs to follow would be sold in kit form.Source: Auction Team Breker / Click to enlargeBlankenbaker's intention was to build and sell a computer that regular...
Read more...
An anonymous bidder laid out a cool $91K and change in an online auction to put an extra-special Iron Man Limited Edition Galaxy S6 Edge in their pocket, agreeing to pay 100 times the retail price for the device due to its 66 serial number (in China six is considered a lucky number, and thus 66 is doubly so). Yes, you read that right, and no, it is not the 1st of April, not in the U.S., China, or anywhere else today on our spinning blue rock. The JD.com auction for the devilishly cool Iron Man Limited Edition Galaxy S666 Edge comes just two weeks after another one of the Edge-y Tony Stark devices sold on eBay for the comparatively low price of $35,600. Specifically,...
Read more...
If you have a ton of money to throw at a computer, you can go in one of two directions -- either all out and load it up with the latest and greatest cutting edge components, or old school (as in, really old school) and pick up a vintage system that's so dated and rare that it's now become a high-priced collectible. The Henry Ford museum complex took the latter route by winning an auction for one of the first Apple-1 computers. The winning bid was $905,000, shipping not included. That bid qualifies the auctioned off Apple-1 as the most expensive Apple computer ever sold, trumping the $671,400 price a similar system fetched at an auction in Germany last year. There's some significant history behind...
Read more...
Online auction site eBay announced today that its board of directors approved a plan to split eBay and PayPal into independent publicly traded companies in 2015. By spinning PayPal off into its own business, the board feels both companies will be in a better position to capitalize on their respective growth opportunities. "eBay and PayPal will be sharper and stronger, and more focused and competitive as leading, standalone companies in their respective markets," said eBay Inc. President and CEO John Donahoe. "As independent companies, eBay and PayPal will enjoy added flexibility to pursue new market and partnership opportunities. And we are confident following a thorough assessment of the relationships...
Read more...
Attention all eBay users, go ahead and change your password to the auction site. Like, right now -- we'll wait. Take your time, we'll be here when you get back. Finished? Good! Don't worry, it wasn't an arbitrary exercise -- eBay later today will be sending out emails and posting notices asking you to change your password due to a security breach. Some placeholder pages were spotted online by savvy web users that seemed to suggest a notice was forthcoming. The folks at The Wall Street Journal got in touch with eBay and found out that a cyberattack compromised a database containing encrypted passwords and other non-financial data. Image Source: Flickr (Janitors) According to eBay, extensive tests...
Read more...
It might seem hard to fathom, but $300,000 is hardly the most expensive lunch date ever. In fact, it's not even the most expensive lunch date with Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. In a charity auction last year, the winning bid to spend some time with Cook eating and chewing the fat came to over $600,000, which obliterated what had been a record $255,000 winning bid for a sit down with former U.S. President Bill Clinton. By comparison, this year's winning bid is a steal. The CharityBuzz auction for lunch with Tim Cook this year brought in $300,001 for the RFK Center for Justice and Human rights. That's half of what the winning bid was a year ago, though three times as much as the charity site's goal,...
Read more...
Ever since terrestrial broadcasters shut down their stations and went off the air, the FCC has been mulling what to do with sections of spectrum and how that wireless space should be allocated between wireless broadcasters and other types of use. It's a complicated issue, in that much of the frequency in question is in the valuable 1GHz band. Verizon and AT&T have both expressed a great deal of interest in sucking that bandwidth down -- but given the strength and reach of the two carriers, the FCC is evaluating rules that would limit their spectrum purchases in order to encourage competition. In response, AT&T has said that it might prefer to sit out the auction altogether rather than...
Read more...
It's unfortunate that today's generation is more likely to associate David Hasselhoff with his drunken attempt at eating a cheeseburger off of the floor than with his portrayal of Michael Knight, a high-tech crime fighter who rode around in one of the coolest cars of all time, a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am, otherwise known as KITT. What made KITT so awesome was the integrated artificial intelligence. Long before Siri, Google Now, or Cortana existed, KITT was giving Knight directions and saving his bacon time and again. Good news if you're a fan of the original Knight Rider series - KITT is for sale. Interestingly, it's not going for an obscene price. It's up for auction by Julien's Live with a starting...
Read more...
The auction price for one of the original (and still working) Apple-1 computers started at $116,000 and was expected to fetch somewhere between $260,000 and $400,000 when Christie’s put it on the block in Germany. Instead, it set a record: $671,400, or about $520,000 euros. The previous record, according to the New York Times, was set at an auction of another working Apple-1 last year at $640,00. (We’ll resist the urge to make an “Apple tax” joke here.) Originally, the Apple-1 sold for $666.66 back in 1976 (or roughly $2,700 when adjusted for modern-day inflation). It’s possible that there were only 200 Apple-1’s ever made, and reportedly only 50 or so still...
Read more...
History tells us that when the next Apple I (or Apple-1, if you prefer) goes up for sale this weekend at an auction house in Germany, it will fetch an obscene amount of money for what amounts to an obsolete system. It's not that anyone is buying these things to run legacy software, mind you, they're doing it to own a piece of history, and they're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. This is the same auction house that sold a working Apple I computer on November 24, 2012 for a record $640,000. Prior to that, the record sat at $374,500 for a system that was auctioned off by Sotheby's in New York. Pretty crazy for a computer that originally sold for $666.66 back in 1976 when it...
Read more...
eBay announced that it's restructuring its fees for sellers on its online auction site, the timing of which has everything to do with Amazon recently raising fees for merchants on its e-commerce portal. As the price of doing business through Amazon goes up, eBay hopes to attract disgruntled sellers looking to jump ship. In order to do that, eBay needs to make its online auction site a more desirable location to sell products, which entails lowering fees and making its fee structure less complicated. Both are on the top of eBay's agenda. Rather than a tiered fee structure, eBay is transitioning to flat rate sales model based on an item's category. Non-volume sellers will especially benefit from...
Read more...
