By Jasmine Laws | Newsweek
An Apple computer from 1976 that was created by Steve Jobs is about to be available to buy in an auction on September 12 in New York City at Christie’s.
The computer, the Apple I, was designed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the 1970s and is expected fetch an estimated price of between $500,000 and $800,000 in auction, according to the auction house, which describes it as, “A herald of the home computing revolution and of the internet age.”
The computer’s claim to fame is that it led to the birth of Apple, as it reportedly inspired Jobs and Wozniak to originally form the company to sell it and was technically the first item under the now legendary tech brand’s banner.
It was also “the first personal computer sold with a fully assembled motherboard,” according to the Christie’s listing.
In order to raise money for the prototype, Jobs had to sell his Volkswagen Kombi and Wozniak had to pawn his HP calculator, the auction house reports.
Not only was the computer hand-built in a garage, with only 200 ever made, but it also raised eyebrows when its original price tag read $666.66 — a number widely associated with the devil.
The decision to have such a specific number is reportedly because Wozniak liked repeated digits, according to the National Museum of American History.
It has been reported that Jobs also advertised the computer using a handwritten note, which was sold for auction in 2023 for $175,759, according to India Today. The pen-on-paper advertisement included the computer’s specifications, Jobs’ address, and his contact details.
Before 2000, the laptop was priced at $10,000, New Atlas reported. in 2009, it increased to $50,000, and the following year, one was sold for $190,867. During this time the Apple II had been released in 1977, the Macintosh was launched in 1984, and the Mac was produced in 1998.
By June 2012, the price of auctioned Apple I computers rose to $374,500, only four months later it shot up to $627,000. Prior to this time, the iPhone had been released in 2006 and the iPad in 2010. By October 2014, the Apple I reportedly fetched $905,000.
Apple’s revenue soared to $1.5 billion within the first eight years of its launch in 1976, according to Statista. In the U.S., the company’s total net sales amounted to $383.29 billion in the 2023 financial year.
In 2023, Apple sold 21.9 million Macs, less than 10 percent of the total number of PC shipments observed across the entire market, according to Statista. It also sold 232 million iPhones in 2023
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