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Rare Operating Apple 1 Rakes In $374,500 At Sotheby's Auction
coondoggie writes "It's not one-of-a-kind, but it's pretty darn close. Sotheby's this week auctioned off a rare, working Apple 1 computer for $374,500 to an unnamed bidder. The price was more than double the expected price listed on the Sotheby's web site. Sotheby's notes about the Apple 1 say it is one of six thought-to-be-operational boxes and one of about 50 known to exist."
Sounds like a pretty run of the mill Apple mark up...
Still cheaper than an iPhone
Imagine a.. wait, I can't. there's only 6 of them.
I'd definitely want AppleCare for this one, those Apple 1 computers are notoriously fragile.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Very scarce and unique item, that thing should be pretty hard to copy as all the chips on the board are impossible to manufacture nowdays. Who does MOS at that big scale today ? Or the other rare electronic components inside..
Such an artifact might be worth millions in a few decades, should be a good anti-inflation bet.
It's even user upgradable.
Ewwwwwwww
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
...a retail price of $666.66, a number that garnered complaints among conservative Christians
A new Apple I, $666.66. Upsetting conservative Christians, priceless.
...if you take that puppy to a 'Genius Bar'. Most of those geniuses wouldn't even know what it was, and that the Woz actually built it with his bare hands.
Silence is a state of mime.
They didn't make everything out of CRAP in those days. I've got electrolytics over 50 years old in an R-392 surplus tube type receiver that still work fine - the whole receiver works fine, dozens of tubes, intricate geared ganged tuning slugs and all. If you contracted to build that thing today you would probably pay north of $100,000 per, even using surplus tubes from ebay.
I've got a 10,000 uF 15 V electrolytic I bought around 1960 or so, somewhere. Or was it 100,000? If I can find it, I can test it with a DVM and a resistor.
There are other, rarer items from that era that consistently sell for much less. I won't speculate on the other possibilities, but technology enthusiast can safely be ruled out.
Of course they did. It's just that the crap stuff isn't here anymore, so the survivors were the better ones.
Same deal with houses, when some idiot says that they make worse houses now, they're forgetting about all the crap houses from back then that don't exist anymore.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
They didn't make everything out of CRAP in those days
Average build quality may have been higher (though it wasn't always), but that doesn't change the fact that old electrolytic caps will still fail. If you read a guide on troubleshooting an old solid-state pinball machine from the late 1970s or early 1980s, one of the first things it will tell you to do is replace the filter caps. They can and usually do go bad over time, causing unstable operation.
You realize that there are only SIX known operating Apple 1's, right? The production run was around 200. That means roughly 3% survived - the rest are either in a landfill, or non-operational. And who knows what condition they are in - for all we know, they could've had parts replaced (including capacitors).
Heck, the original Apple 1 hanging at 1 Infinite Loop might not even work anymore. (It's sitting in a plaque marked "Our Founder").
While that is certainly true, i'd add that back then there simply weren't that many manufacturers for chips and caps so you didn't get really chip shitty dodgy parts like you do today. back then the boards were thick, traces thick, caps were made by a few companies for primarily industrial uses so were built tough, there just wasn't tons of truly cheap shitty parts to build something like that out of.
This is why I'd argue that its easier, when comparing number existing VS number made of course, that its more likely that old VIC or Atari VCS will work well VS say your average PC from 1994 or the first Playstations, because by that time it was a LOT easier to cut corners by using cheap chips than it was in the late 1970s. There is a good reason why a lot of today's stuff is called 'designed for the dump" and that is because the parts are so thin and cheap that you can practically look at it funny and kill the damned thing whereas i can't even count how many times i knocked my old VIC off my desktop into the floor and it was still working when it disappeared during my last move 5 years ago.
Finally i have to wonder whether we'll have anything THAT old still working 36 years from now thanks to the new solder and tin whiskers. I have an engineering buddy and you want to hear an all day rant just bring up the new solder, he says he can't count the number of times he's opened up something fairly new that failed and couldn't trace it back to the new solder. So while I wouldn't be surprised if you'll be able to find PCs from the 70s and 80s still running i have to wonder if we'll see anything from our current era or will it all be in the dump.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you kill this Apple 1, will all the other Apple devices around the world revert to a move open and less evil state?
I know a guy still on his first Xbox 360!
Actually, it has solid-state storage, no DVD-R, no BD support, not much on gaming, and it HAS a retina display (if you stand back far enough)...
I don't have to read anything. I have first hand experience with many kinds of antique electronics. I'm not going to tell you that electrolytics never failed until crap manufacturers started using crap constituents and crap manufacturing in the late 90's, but I CAN tell you they didn't practically always fail after a piss-poor life like they did after that. And I CAN tell you a lot of mil surplus stuff from Vietnam, Korea, and WW-II still works, original electrolytics and all. That's not a guess; that's first hand experience. I CAN tell you that it's not uncommon that computer equipment from the 70s and 80s still works, but it IS uncommon that stuff from the late 90s through at least the mid 2000's works for more than a few years, and there is still a lot of crap being built, though it is starting to recover a little from the nadir of around 2000.
You realize that there are only SIX known operating Apple 1's, right? The production run was around 200. That means roughly 3% survived - the rest are either in a landfill, or non-operational. And who knows what condition they are in - for all we know, they could've had parts replaced (including capacitors).
Heck, the original Apple 1 hanging at 1 Infinite Loop might not even work anymore. (It's sitting in a plaque marked "Our Founder").
I think that one got sold, didn't it.
Oh, and it's SEVEN now. My one-owner Apple 1 still works, and it isn't in the Apple 1 Registry. Mike Willeagal (who runs the Apple 1 Registry site) says he can't figure out where Sotheby's came up with the "Six working" figure, except maybe they counted the ones on his site that mention that they have BEEN working.