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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...
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.
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
Well, technically they probably wouldn't know what it was immediately simply because the Apple I shipped as basically a motherboard. People had to buy their own case, power supply, etc -- no different than the custom-built PCs of today. So unless the 'Genius' opened the case, they wouldn't necessarily even know it was an Apple product.
It's interesting to note that even back then, Apple's philosophy was sell the hardware, give away the software [big jpg ahead].
From the Apple I ad: "And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library."
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.