The original Apple computer, built by hand by the founders of the company Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak 45 years ago, was sold on Tuesday for 400 thousand dollars (about 346 thousand euros) at an auction in the United States.
The work of the Apple-1, considered the great-great-grandfather of today’s sleek Macbooks, was expected to cost up to $ 600,000 (about € 520,000) when it went up for auction in California.
The so-called “Chaffee College” Apple-1 is one of 200 produced by Jobs and Wozniak at the start of the company’s odyssey from the beginning of the garage to the tech empire it has become.
What makes it even more rare is the fact that the computer is housed in a koa wood case, a typical Hawaiian wood. Only a small number of the original 200 were produced in this way.
Jobs and Wozniak sold the Apple-1 primarily as a component. The computer store, which received about 50 units, decided to wrap some of them in wood, the auction house points out.
“It’s kind of the holy grail for old tech collectors,” said Corey Cohen, an Apple-1 expert. Los angeles times… “This is really exciting for a lot of people,” he said.
John Moran Auctioneers said the device, which was sold with a 1986 Panasonic video monitor, had just two owners. “It was originally bought by an electronics professor at Chaffee College in Rancho Cucamonga, California, who sold it to a student in 1977,” the auction house said in an ad.
O Los angeles times reported that the unidentified student paid only $ 650 (€ 562) for him at the time.
While the auction price of $ 400,000 represents a healthy return on investment for a former student, it is far from a record for this device, as a worker Apple-1, which hit the market in 2014, was sold to Bonhams for over $ 900,000 ($ 778,000). Euro).
“A lot of people just want to know what kind of people build Apple-1 computers, not just people in the tech industry,” Cohen said.
Apple was successful in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but failed after Jobs and Wozniak left. However, in the late 1990s, the company was revived, and Jobs returned as CEO, leading the release of the iPod and then the iPhone.
