An Apple I Computer Sells for $210,000 — Priceless

In November 2010, an Apple I computer — one of the original machines assembled by Steve Wozniak and sold by Steve Jobs from the Jobs family garage in Los Altos in 1976 — sold at a Christie's auction in London for £133,250, roughly $210,000, shattering previous records for Apple memorabilia and establishing the Apple I as one of the most valuable artifacts in computing history.

The machine sold with its original packaging and a sales letter signed by Steve Jobs; Steve Wozniak attended the auction and added his autograph to the lot. Italian businessman and collector Marco Boglione won it with a phone bid and planned to restore it to working condition. Of the approximately 200 Apple I computers Wozniak assembled, only around 30 to 50 are believed to still exist, and far fewer remain in working condition.

What the auction price reflected was not merely nostalgia or collector eccentricity but a genuine reckoning with the machine's historical significance. The Apple I was not the first personal computer, and it was not technically the most sophisticated machine of its time. What it represented was the beginning of a specific vision of computing — that computers were not just tools for scientists and corporations but objects for individuals, machines that ordinary people might own and use to extend their capabilities.

The buyer was acquiring a direct connection to the moment when that vision became a product. Every iPhone, every MacBook, every piece of technology that has followed in the tradition of making computing personal traces its ancestry, at least spiritually, to the rough-hewn board that Wozniak assembled and Jobs persuaded a computer hobbyist shop to stock.

At $210,000, it is arguably underpriced.