Here's your chance to buy an ancient, working APPLE ONE Woz it the gambling habit that crippled your finances? Or Woz it the fact you spent hundreds of thousands of quid on an ancient Apple computer that can't even send a tweet? If it Woz the latter, at least you'll be able to tell your wife, accountant or mummy that you've snapped up a bit of history at the same time as ridding …
"The machine is expected to net between $300,000 and $500,000, depending on how wealthy and overexcited the audience is."
"At the current price of $1,299.00, you could buy about 300,000 units of the basic MacBook Retina model for the same price."
Beggin' you' Lordhip's pardon... but $300,000 to $500,000 divided by $1,299 gives you between 230 and 384 units (rounding to whole units, of course).
and buy the thing and ceremoniously destroy it out of pure hatred for Mr Jobs and his cult?
Come on Jasper, we know that you don't like the Fruity Company so it shouldn't be too hard to find someone to do this for you. It would really make your day.
Apple Haters?
You mean someone who is sick of supporting devices where most of the useful configuration options have been stripped out? Or someone who is tired of telling the Apple phone reps, "no, we truly don't still have that 10-year old credit card", when simply trying to access data on a device their company paid for with its own money? Or someone who is tired of having to uninstall iTunes and Safari and Quicktime and "bonjour" off a bunch of bogged down office PCs? Or someone who is tired of hearing "All my documents are missing from my MacBook - can you help me? Were they in that folder thingey I deleted last weekend so I could download more movies?"
Those Apple-haters?
I'll bet they would actually be pretty impressed with this earliest of PC boards. You have to separate out the business of screwing people out of their money from the marvel of technological innovation - two completely different things.
Those Apple-haters?
Those trolls, yes.
Then, after a long, and, it must be admitted, faintly amusing rant that has (tenuous) roots in reality, and a propos of nothing in particular,
You have to separate out the business of screwing people out of their money from the marvel of technological innovation - two completely different things.
As far as I am aware, Apple has never really been about the marvel of technological innovation (well, to be fair, very few consumer boxes ever are) - Jobs stated, openly, and more often than can be counted, that the company philosphy was to start with the user experience and engineer backwards to create the product. So, product innovation (iPod, iTunes store, iPad, OSX, etc etc etc) but not really technological innovation. I don't see any shame in that.
And if it happens to end up costing more, and people are prepared to pay more for better quality of manufacture and a more rewarding experience, then well done Apple. No point in ranting about it.
No, I'm not a fanboi. Far from it, my only Apple product is an iPhone 4S. I just admire decent quality kit when I see it. I get just as frustrated with some of the Apple configuration options as I do with some of the Windows interface "quirks", but I do hate Android with a passion. They went too far in the other direction with the configuation options in that, and I still can't type a coherent text message or email in that awful abomination.
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As all true Apple experts know the terrane in the south-south-east corner of the garage was superb that year, and the boards from that region are suffused with far fewer oxygenated copper micro-inclusions than the inferior specimens from the rest of the garage.
$7.65mil I reckon, could go higher if the wood mounts are vibration-free aged oak from Etruscan wine amphora racks.
Even thought Saint Jobs tried to eradicate them, Serial Ports[0] still have uses. Including connecting dumb terminals to more functional systems that can be used by twits to send tweets. Unfortunately, the twits have no concept of this reality.
Yes, an Apple-1 can drive a serial port.
Is the Apple-1 a useful tool today? Nope.
Is it a good bit of history, assuming accurate provenance? Yep.
I'd happily pay ~US$3,000 for one in functional condition. No more. I could easily make a reproduction that would fool "experts" for under US$4,000[1][2]. It's not like the technology is a big secret or anything, all the OEM parts are readily available, as is the board layout. Not saying this particular example is a reproduction, just stating facts.
[0] Siri, what is a serial port?
[1] Probably quite a bit less that half that, if you don't include my time ...
[2] Note that there are HUGE gaps in the records of original production ... the systems were not serialized, although some re-sellers added second-party numbers.
Once the prices of ol' computer kit advances into spheres usually occupied by the contemporary art market, we'll soon see similar side effects, i.e. jakes producing forgeries. Here we already have the suitable provenance: ... booted up in August by Apple expert Corey Cohen. It must be real!
So jake, what you need besides a few $100 for the parts, is a Corey Cohen to attest it's origin. (Hint: at least in the art market such "experts" can be convinced to render the expert opinion you're looking for. Shouldn't be such a problem with computers...)
But the only piece of home computer history I'd go seriously in hock for would be this lost treasure:
"REA Express terminated operations and filed for bankruptcy. As a result, the first Altair 8800 microcomputer was lost, as it had been shipped a few weeks earlier via REA and never arrived."
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Express_Agency
It could be sitting, Lost Ark style, in a crate in some dusty corner of a warehouse somewhere, but unfortunately was probably long since consigned to some landfill.
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