Old Apple computer... may sell for $800,000!
Bonhams auction house has announced the listing of a rare Apple-1 computer, belonging to Fred Teitelbaum of New Orleans, in the upcoming “History of Science, Technology, and Computing” auction, which will be held online from October 4 to 14 this year, with an estimated price ranging between $500,000 and $800,000. The device is one of fewer than 75 documented units still in existence out of approximately 200 originally produced, and it is classified as a fully functional model to this day.
The motherboard bears the signature of co-founder Steve Wozniak, and it comes with a letter written by Steve Jobs in 1978 to Teitelbaum, creating a direct and unusual link between Apple’s founders and a single specific unit. However, the value of the letter extends beyond being a signed memento; it serves as evidence of what the company actually intended for this particular device.
After Apple discontinued production of the Apple-1 in 1977, it began encouraging owners to trade in their units for newer models, destroying the returned motherboards, which contributed to reducing the number of surviving copies to less than half of the original 200 manufactured. There was also a practical reason for this approach: Wozniak was reportedly the only employee capable of providing technical support for this obsolete device.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wrote a signed letter on January 18, 1978, in his capacity as Vice President of Operations, requesting that Teitelbaum return his unit without the memory chips in exchange for $400 in cash and an Apple II motherboard with 4 kilobytes of memory. Teitelbaum could keep the memory chips, but the unit itself was supposed to be returned to the company.
Key milestones in the device’s history since that letter include:
• Teitelbaum sold the computer in 2013 for $40,000 while it was non-functional, before it underwent restoration and was successfully rebooted.
• The device was later sold at a previous auction for $671,400, reflecting the significant surge in value among surviving copies of Apple’s first computers.
Thus, Teitelbaum’s refusal nearly five decades ago became the decisive factor that saved the computer from the destruction that befell most of its peers. Teitelbaum kept the device through multiple relocations rather than discarding it when it became technologically obsolete, making it today, along with the accompanying Jobs letter, a tangible testament to a decision that could have erased the machine from history had it been followed.
