British technology news and opinion website The Register reports that another Apple-1 is about to hit the auction block. Says The Reg:

This Apple-1 was acquired from Adam Schoolsky, a friend of Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, for $3,500 in 1994 by David Larson, a former professor at Virginia Tech.

Gets your wallets out and take out that second mortgage now, as bidding begins on September 25. Read RR Auction’s listing here.

Image Source: The Register

On May 20, 2017, another Apple-1 will hit the auction block. MacRumors reports that it will include "the original manual and documentation, the receipt for the motherboard and cassette recorder, and even a record of telephone conversations with Steve Jobs and Wozniak." It appears to be Apple-1 #14, as detailed in Mike Willegal’s Apple-1 Registry.

This is not the first time an Apple-1 has been sold by German auction house Breker: they sold one in November 2012 for $640,000, and another in May 2013 for $671,400. Expect this one to fetch a similarly high price.

UPDATE (May 22, 2017): This Apple-1 sold at auction for only €110,000 ($130,000).

This Apple-1, described by Bonhams Auctions as, “in nearly perfect condition” was put up for auction in September with a starting bid of $300,000. It bears the number 01-0059, indicating it was one of the batch Apple sold to The Byte Shop. Bonhams expected the computer to go for as much as $500,000 and stated, “The customer had only used the Apple-1 once or twice, and Mr. Romkey set it on a shelf, and did not touch it again.” It even has the coveted white ceramic 6502 CPU still in place and was tested as functional, but BBC News reports that it was one of only two lots in Bonhams’s “History of Science and Technology” auction that failed to sell.

Is the “gold rush” over?

This is being posted as a service to the retro-computing community.  The following message from VCF founder and respected hobbyist Sellam Ismail appeared on the Classiccmp mailing list this evening.

eBay seller id "tvrsales" is currently selling property stolen from the Vintage Computer Festival.

If you are planning on buying anything of a vintage computer nature from eBay seller "tvrsales" in Stockton, California, please know that you are most likely bidding on stolen property.

The VCF Archives were stolen by Tri-Valley Recycling (eBay ID "tvrsales") in cahoots with the landlords of the building where it was sold. The sordid tale can be read about through lawsuit material already on my
website for download: http://vintagetech.com/download/lawsuit/

Whether or not you believe Sellam’s account of this dispute, it may be wise to reconsider bidding on items from eBay user “tvrsales” until any legal issues have been settled. Caveat emptor.

The Apple-1 to most recently hit the auction block went for a record € 500,000 (nearly $650,000 USD).  Read all about it here.

 (HT: Mike Willegal)

While the most recent Apple-1 auction failed to close with a successful sale – bidding on the non-functional unit didn’t meet the $80,071 minimum price – another unit is scheduled to hit the auction block in November.  This particular Apple-1 is not only complete and working, but  comes with several original peripherals including a 9″ Sanyo monitor, a Datanetics ASCII keyboard, and a transformer.  The original documentation is included with the lot, though the cassette interface and tapes are listed as “reproductions”.  It would also appear that the MOS 6502 chip currently in the unit is not the original ceramic CPU.  Read more about the auction here. 

This month on Open Apple, Mike and Ken speak with Martin Haye, 8-bit programmer extraordinare. We love us some conventions, be they KansasFest, the Vintage Computer Festival, @party, ROFLCon, or WordCamp. We wonder why video games have abandoned humor and if Kickstarter can bring it back. Steve Wozniak is advising the Steve Jobs film — no, not the one in which Ashton Kutcher will play Steve Jobs, but that raises the question: who will play the hosts of Open Apple? On eBay, we’re suspicious of an Apple IIe that was supposedly once Jobs’, and we wish there were a more comprehensive online resource for Apple II clones.

Listen now at the Open Apple site, or subscribe in iTunes or the Zune Marketplace.

The Apple Computer Company Partnership Agreement, which established Apple as a partnership between Jobs, Woz and Ron Wayne and was signed by all three co-founders, went for an incredible $1.35 million dollars at a Sotheby’s auction yesterday.  Once you add in all the various fees attached to the sale, the final cost weighs in at a hefty $1.6 million.  Expected to fetch as much as $150,000 in Tuesday’s auction, the three-page typewritten document was made obsolete when the new Apple Computer Co., was officially created on January 3, 1977 and bought out the nine month old partnership.  Wayne kept the document and later sold it to a collectible documents dealer who then sold it to a private collector in the late 1990s.

This should put to rest any doubt about the increasing hunger for early Apple II collectibles, especially through legitimate auction houses.

Then again, it’s still possible to get lucky and find a gem like this for a steal at an estate auction or thrift store.