Steve Jobs’ Apple-1 prototype hits auction block, likely to fetch $500,000

By Team Newsable | First Published Jul 26, 2022, 10:34 AM IST

It's being held at RR Auction House. The auction is still ongoing and will end on August 18. This Apple-1 gadget is one of just 200 that Steve Jobs created in his Los Altos home with Steve Wozniak, Patty Jobs, and Daniel Kottke.

Apple enthusiasts with considerable resources may own a piece of history by purchasing Steve Jobs' original prototype for the company's first computer. A prototype for the Apple-1 computer, the first desktop computer, is presently being auctioned off. You may be wondering what makes this so unique. Back in 1976, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had it and used it to demonstrate the capabilities of the Apple-1 computer. The final price is expected to exceed $500,000, according to the auction house.

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Corey Cohen, an Apple-1 computer specialist, authenticated the artefact this year, according to RR Auction. The circuit board corresponded to images taken by Terrell and published in Time Magazine in 2012. Reports suggest that the Apple 1 prototype, it should have had a MOS 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz, a 40 x 24 character display, 4 KB of RAM scalable to 8 KB or 48 KB through extension cards, and 456 KB of storage.

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According to the auction company, this prototype was left on "Apple Garage" property for several years until being presented to a person around 30 years ago by Steve Jobs himself. According to RR Auction House, the gadget is in poor shape, and some of the components were removed by Steve Jobs for other Apple-1 computers.

This is not the first time the Apple 1 computer has been auctioned off. In 2014, one of the Apple-1 computers held by a New York family was sold for $905,000 at auction. It was supposedly one of 50 devices sold by Steve Jobs to the ByteShop in California. It remains to be seen how much RR Auction House will make, although analysts estimate it will at least make over $5,000,000.

Also Read | Extremely rare, natural salt-water pearl necklace sells for Rs 6.2 crore at online auction

Apple has grown from its humble beginnings with Jobs and Wozniak in the 1970s to become a worldwide tech powerhouse in succeeding decades. The corporation today has a market capitalization of about $2.5 trillion and is one of the most valuable companies in the world.

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