Steve Jobs Apple 1 Computer Sells for £240,929

Apple 1, the first off the rack personal computer manufactured by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak just fetched a whopping £240,929 in an auction at Sotheby’s. The event took place in New York.

The sale price of Apple 1 amazed the tech world, where computer prices depreciate at a fast pace with the launch of every new model. However, this auction has built a new record for sale of one of the computers.

It was believed to be a rare computer, with a naked motherboard, and this is perhaps one of the reasons it was sold for double the price of the original estimation. Some Apple 1s, which were truly handmade, sold out for $666.66 in April 1976. These computers were not even equipped with a case, keyboard, monitor or power supply. They usually consist of 4 kilobytes of memory, while having a processor of 1 MHz.

In contrast, the latest iPhone is powered with 512 megabytes of memory and also includes a dual-core processor operating at 800 MHz.

“When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs presented the Apple 1 Computer to the Homebrew Computer Club in 1976, it was dismissed by everyone but Paul Terrell, the owner of a chain of stores called Byte Shop,” said Sotheby’s in its catalogue for the auction.

“Terrell ordered 50 computers for $500 a piece, insisting that the circuit boards come fully assembled rather than as DIY kits similar to the Altair, and Jobs and Woz managed to produce the requisite computers in 30 days.”

Back in 1999, an Apple 1 got a whopping $50,000 for it, and in November 2010, another went on auction for $178,000.

According to Sotheby’s, there had been a clash among two parties to obtain the computer but finally, an unidentified telephone bidder grabbed the machine.

In the beginning of this year, a prototype of the first Apple Mac was placed on eBay with the initial price of $99,995 but no offers were made for it.