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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Back in October 1976, an introductory ad invited computer users to "Byte into an Apple" for a devilish $666 (and 66 cents). Taking into account inflation, such a system would cost a little over $2,500 today. Throw nostalgia into the mix, however, and the price balloons, as an original Apple I system is expected to rake in as much as $127,000 when it goes up for auction in a couple of months. Auction house Christie's is handling the the sale, and according to the description, this particular unit is a "rare original" that once belonged to Joe Copson, a former Apple employee. The serial number on the bottom reads "22." "Realized in 1976 by the Apple Computer Company, the Apple I machine was designed...
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Still pissed at your parents for trashing your vintage baseball card or comic book collection when you were a teen? Hey, it could worse. Imagine if they would have tossed a barrel of old Apple gear into the garbage bin. Apple nostalgia is apparently commanding premium prices these days, as evidenced by an Apple I motherboard and an old handwritten letter by Steve Jobs from back when he worked for Atari. The working Apple I motherboard fetched $374,500 dollars from the highest bidder at auction house Sotheby's. It's a working piece of history that also includes a couple of user manuals, circuit diagrams, and warranty information (which we're sure is no longer valid). According to Apple Insider,...
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Ultimate NVIDIA Themed Gaming System for Auction on eBay – 100% of proceeds going to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society!One of the fastest and most tricked out PCs ever built is up for auction on eBay What: One of the fastest, most tricked out PCs ever built has just been put up for auction on eBay. With a one of a kind NVIDIA themed paint job created by Smooth Creations, the system features two watercooled GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards in SLI, NVIDIA 3D Vision Glasses and Samsung 2233RZ 3D Vision Ready Display, an Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition CPU, 12GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR3 Memory, an ASUS Rampage II Gene X58 Motherboard, two 256GB Crucial SSD Hard Drives in Raid 0, two 1TB Western...
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Watch out eBay: there’s a new Web auction in town. Rockybid.com launched its unique online auction service earlier this week. This auction service has a business plan that’s like no other auction service we’ve seen to date. In traditional auction fashion, Rockybid starts auctions with a set price (in this case, $0) and sets a time limit for the auction. The auction site differs from eBay and other popular auction outlets in that it adds 15 seconds to the auction countdown clock each time a bid is placed. In addition, prices increase by just $0.01 or $0.15 depending on the auction. The winner of the auction is the last person to place a bid before the timer reaches zero. Rockybid customers must...
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23-year-old Kelly Gray was just hoping to defray some of the costs of her wedding when she decided to auction off a bridesmaid spot in her wedding on eBay. But she got far more than she bargained for.When the bidding closed at 7:27 p.m. on Wednesday, the winning bid was $5,700. The winner: "drpeppersnapple".Gray and her fiance had planned to keep the wedding budget under $7,000 by using an iPod, instead of a DJ and baking their own wedding cake. Now they can plan for something a bit bigger.A representative for Dr. Pepper Snapple Group says they'll even provide drinks for the April 19, 2009 wedding. They also plan to launch a Website to find Kelly a bridesmaid, or possibly even provide a surprise...
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Many eBay users are up in arms about the changes in fee structure on the site that favor large vendors selling goods at fixed prices on a "Buy it Now" basis instead of eBay's original auction format. The little vendors who have made the site what it is today don't like it, but eBay might simply be acknowledging the obvious: Online auctions were a fad, and the fad might be over. What happened to auctions? Not only do shoppers want convenience, they're also looking for value. And the proliferation of pricing information online has made it easier for consumers to bargain-hunt and lessened the need to risk overbidding in an auction. Hershenson recalls when a new $40 toaster could fetch $80 on eBay,...
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All right, all right, it wasn't the greatest show on TV - and this is just a replica - but still, it's Airwolf! Ernest Borgnine was great as "Santini." Of course, the auction is available only to pre-approved bidders.A friend invites you over for a BBQ and you ask, how big is your lawn? He asks why and you tell him not to worry about it -- then you land in his front yard in frickin Airwolf and fly away with his girlfriend. Kid getting bullied in school? Pick him up in AIRWOLF and see what happens. If he doesn't get instant street cred, you can always just waste the place with your sidewinder missiles (not included).Of course, it would take a lot of work to perform any of these heroic acts, because...
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Remember the father who sold his pot-smoking son's Guitar Hero III game on eBay as punishment? The father netted $9K in that auction. The mom here won't get that much, but at least she's teaching her kid a lesson.A 13-year-old kid in Virginia has backtalked to his mom for the last time. When he was told to do his chores instead of play Xbox 360, he went and intentionally broke the vacuum cleaner to get out of it. What'd his mom do? Well, she's selling his Xbox and all his games on eBay. And that was before she found out he was surfing porn sites by checking out his browser's cookies.Porn on a teenage boy's PC? No! Let's hope she gets enough for a new vacuum. eBay needs a new...
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