This Apple-1 Computer Is The Most Expensive In The World

While it might have been a “working computer,” it certainly wasn’t complete, and it looked nothing like what we expect a fully functioning computer to look like today. The first Apple-1s were basically just a fully assembled circuit board with 60 or so microchips. The end user still had to provide the “case, power supply transformers, power switch, ASCII keyboard, and composite video display” (via Jeffry Norman’s History of Information). Thankfully, the Apple-1 was selling at a computer hobbyist store where someone could purchase all of those things separately — American consumerism at its finest. 

Over the years, several computers from the first batch of 200 Apple-1s have sold at auction. Each is unique because, after their initial sale, they were customized by each owner. In November 2021, the “Chaffey College” Apple-1, named because it was initially purchased by a professor at the college, sold for $400,000. In March 2020, RR Auction sold one for $458,711. In May 2019, Christie’s sold one for $459,000. Christie’s reportedly sold one signed by Steve Wozniak in 2013 for $387,750, and Charitybuzz sold another for $815,000 in August 2016.

Yet, none of those were the priciest Apple on the tree.

In October 2014, the Henry Ford Museum paid $905,000 for what amounted to a “vintage keyboard with pre-7400-series military specification chips, a vintage Sanyo monitor, a custom power supply in a wooden box, as well as two vintage tape-decks.” After what was described by Bonhams as “fierce competition with a bidder on the telephone,” the final sale price ended at nearly twice the estimate going into the auction. That kind of money puts a whole new spin on the idiom, “How ’bout them apples?”