Apple-1 Owned by Apple’s First Applications Engineer Sells for $315,000+ at Auction
Credit: RR Auctions
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An Apple-1 computer owned by Apple’s first applications engineer sold for $315,000+ at auction, along with a number of other Apple-related items.
The fully functional Apple-1 Computer was sourced from former Apple employee Dana Redington. The computer came from a “trade-in” pile that Steve Jobs had in his office. Jobs and Steve Wozniak gifted the Apple-1 to Redington, who carefully selected the motherboard and accessories from the pile of parts. Apple-1 expert Corey Cohen then restored the gifted computer to working order. The computer had been expected to sell for more than $300,000, so the final price was pretty close to the estimate.
The Apple-1 board was unknown to the Apple collecting community until the auction. It has now been logged in the Apple-1 Registry as #104.
The Apple-1 was accompanied by a letter of provenance from Redington:
“In early 1978, while preparing for a move to a new building, I noticed a pile of soon-to-be-discarded Apple I boards. Apple had offered a trade-in program for upgrading to the Apple II to help phase out the older board. With Wozniak and Jobs’ permission, I selected the best motherboard and a couple of cassette interface cards from the pile.”
Several other items were on the auction block, including a “pitch deck” of several original Polaroids that were part of Jobs’ pitch deck used when presenting the Apple-1 to Paul Terrell, who ordered a batch of Apple-1 machines to sell in The Byte Shop. The pitch deck went for $54,904. The images had been expected to sell for over $30,000.
An original new-in-box 4GB iPhone was also on the block, still factory-sealed. However, the OG iPhone’s auction page merely says, “This lot has closed,” with no final selling price listed.
Another item marked as “closed” with no final sale price shown is the bomber jacket that Steve Jobs wore in an iconic 1983 photograph of Jobs flipping off an IBM sign in New York City. The bomber jacket had been expected to bring as much as $75,000.
Several other items were also up for auction, including several vintage magazines with Jobs gracing the covers, a Steve Jobs NeXT ID badge Polaroid, checks signed by Jobs, Jobs’ 1972 high school yearbook, a Jobs business card, and several classic Macs, and several other historical items.
The auction included several other vintage non-Apple items, including early video game arcade cabinets, a rare PDP-8 system, items signed by current Apple CEO Tim Cook, and autographs from Microsoft’s Bill Gates and other historic industry figures.
Several other items went for a reasonable amount, allowing folks on a budget to grab a piece of Apple history without breaking the bank. These included a rare color Grolier Inc. trading card of Steve Jobs from its 1998 ‘Notable People’ Series, which sold for $160, and a rare premiere issue of Macworld from February 1984 with Steve Jobs on the cover, which sold for $3,451.
Items connected to Apple’s other “Steve,” Steve Wozniak, also sold well. Two early personal and business cards used by the Apple co-founder went for the tidy sum of $5,375. A “Steve Wozniak Shoreline Amphitheatre Jacket” went for a final bid of $250. The bomber jacket was made for Wozniak for his role in constructing the Shoreline Amphitheatre, a 22,500-seat outdoor amphitheater in Mountain View, California.
The “Steve Jobs and the Apple Revolution” auction event, which contained nearly 300 items, ended on August 22, 2024, and brought in a total of $983,096 from all the items.
