Oh man. Both love and hate this video. It’s so slick, which seems the opposite of the late 70s homebrew backer culture.
The video is designed to appeal to nerd nostalgia. However it has problems right from the start when it emphasizes Jobs not Woz (the true nerd hero), including a stylized ascii art.
According to the video, this item is exceptional because it’s fully operational. However paradoxically that’s because it’s never been used. The video praises the owner who bought it and stuck it in a closet, never turning it on. It implicitly puts down the actual users who actually used the machine (burning the paint) and especially those who tinkered with and modifying the machine.
As someone who grew up in the 80s hacking my Apple II+ doing everything from playing Lemonade Stand to building custom coprocessor boards, I salute those who actually used their Apple machines to the max, destroying the collector value.
Woz appears first, then Jobs shortly, then the Apple logo. Arguably Woz's face even appears slightly longer because there's a short pause whereas Jobs just flies by to the Apple logo.
Later there's both "Woz and Jobs holding Apple I".
The video description explicitly calls out "The Steve Wozniak-designed computer".
The by-name callouts in the video are:
- "hand-built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak"
- "in Steve Job's mom's garage."
- Jobs acting as a salesman
I'm not really sure how Jobs is emphasised at all.
Fair enough! Guilty of that attitude, no doubt. I note the corrections in the message above re emphasis on Woz/Jobs.
I think mostly I was annoyed at the emphasis on how the computer is untouched and unused, which seemed the antithesis of the spirit of those early days.
Having said all that, I really felt an urge to bid, though no doubt it's 10x what I can afford.
I worked on the original Mac OS as a 3rd party developer and tester. One of my perks was getting the entire original developer and design team to sign the inside of my original Mac case with felt tip pens. I kind of forgot about it, and when getting my Mac serviced for some reason, the Mac selling computer store stole the case, the police reluctantly got involved, not understanding shit, and it was a whole "thing". The original signed case as never recovered.
From what it looks like, the difficulty shouldn't be in getting a board made or soldering them, but sourcing the parts. Other than the odd 74 series ICs, the design includes some (I think memory?) chips that are nowadays more difficult to find than the 6502 & 6520.
Cassandra, the woman in the video, is a super interesting person. She essentially created the ‘nerd stuff’ auction market at sothebys, including enigma machines, tons of space stuff, she managed the Feynman estate auction..
I’d guess she is planning on making a market for this early Apple gear based on the video. Will the auction result pay for the video? Probably not, but they get to set the market price and be the auction house of record for this going forward, and that could be quite valuable.
Sothebys will be paid in multiples of what that video cost to make. How did you come up with opposite ? Most auction houses take 10- 30 % of price. So youre saying that this computer will cost less than 30k at final price ?
Also, Apple Computer was founded in 1976. But there were already "home" / personal computers sold from other companies for half of decade already. Or you can say that Apple employees did not built Apple-1 computer with already available intel 8008 CPU. Apple employees at that time were not innovators, they were marketers and solder monkeys.
Yes wikipedia is edited by public, and it is confusing on purpose. Apple has billions of dollars, so marketing department got paid to increase confusion on wikipedia articles for all apple products.
By charting computer history on timeline, you can see Apple-1 computer was nothing exceptional. It was just another random kit.
Apples push to sell to gullible teachers was toxic marketing strategy, which worked. So peoples exposed to this brand of computers in schools had emotional attachment to this brand. Yes apple targeted children. Not in China, in USA.
Honestly, even if I had the money, I'd be too afraid to use it. I'd get one of the replica boards.
Those electrolytic capacitors will eventually need replacing. At that point you have to ask yourself if the value will be diminished more by replacing them (with as close to a vintage cap as you can find) to keep it running, or by letting it become nonoperational.
His departure from Apple feels like potent foreshadowing of the Apple Steve envisioned. I remember feeling confused hearing the Apple II story growing up, but as I mature in the industry I really empathize with Woz's lack of patience for bad administration. Feels likely that Steve coveted that attitude, maybe a bit too much for an impromptu business administrator.
Apple is unabashedly, outwardly, privacy focused. Just their law enforcement policies put them way ahead of their competitors. But this argument usually deteriorates to "they are all the same!" so I won't even bother making a case for them.
What I will say that if Apple is what Woz feared. Then what's OpenAI and X/Grok and Google and Facebook (hell bench on world domination)? Unimaginable?
Chorus They are all the same! Chorus
Apple helped create the black rectangle monolith appliances-in-a-smartphone plague. But they are not even in the top 10 list of companies I'm currently worried about. They are far more embarrassing than dangerous as of late.
I think you are attributing to choice what can easily be explained by contigent circumstances.
Apple is privacy focused because it's a lifestyle and tech fashion company that competes with internet data brokers. Apple's instincts for monopoly power, locking down the market and choking life out of their complements is second to none.
Given the opportunity, all successful tech CEOs are bred and selected to burn the world down if the result is aligned to their power goals.
I don't see it as choking the life out of anything. They started in blank slate era of PCs. They grew as a compnay developing many human centric details for computing. They have a group of customers that like that approach and that is who they cater to. They just want to play in their own sandbox. The desire to control their own sandbox and customers is not aggressive. Their success with customers is a reaction to that. The fact that they keep some developers ideas at arms length is not aggressive. They support development with a different set of criteria than the mass market.
It’s both. Steve was who he was. Tim was a gay man in an era when the fbi would blackmail you over your choices. The product decisions and enterprise decisions aren’t made in a vacuum.
Go with the bag, since there is no evidence to support these claims by Sotheby's
Based on historical records, the evidence suggests that only less than 150 to 200 Apple-1 computers were ever made and the assembly team was Wozniak who did most technical assembly, with help from Daniel Kottke, Patty Jobs (Steve's sister), and occasional friends.
Also....the actual video title is: "The Finest Operational Apple-1 Computer in Existence - Handmade by Steve Jobs - Is Now at Sotheby's" an even more wild claim. Then editorialized here to be called in the title of this submission: " Apple-1 Computer, handmade by Jobs and Woz"
The video has low credibility, and changing the title wont change that.
Jobs role has always been reported as business/sales focused rather than hands-on assembly.
[Insert obligatory personal although almost meaningless anecdotes about seeing Woz's castle-themed house when it was first built and almost running over SJ with my VW Westfalia.]
[And literally almost physically colliding into Tim Cook in Los Altos where Garage Technology Ventures used to be.]
[If you need someone important ran into accidentally, I guess that's about my only natural talent.]
Oh man. Both love and hate this video. It’s so slick, which seems the opposite of the late 70s homebrew backer culture.
The video is designed to appeal to nerd nostalgia. However it has problems right from the start when it emphasizes Jobs not Woz (the true nerd hero), including a stylized ascii art.
According to the video, this item is exceptional because it’s fully operational. However paradoxically that’s because it’s never been used. The video praises the owner who bought it and stuck it in a closet, never turning it on. It implicitly puts down the actual users who actually used the machine (burning the paint) and especially those who tinkered with and modifying the machine.
As someone who grew up in the 80s hacking my Apple II+ doing everything from playing Lemonade Stand to building custom coprocessor boards, I salute those who actually used their Apple machines to the max, destroying the collector value.
> it emphasizes Jobs not Woz (the true nerd hero), including a stylized ascii art.
I rewatched it: https://youtu.be/XdBKuBhdZwg?si=nywGYWzsB5HmW2AB&t=184
Woz appears first, then Jobs shortly, then the Apple logo. Arguably Woz's face even appears slightly longer because there's a short pause whereas Jobs just flies by to the Apple logo.
Later there's both "Woz and Jobs holding Apple I".
The video description explicitly calls out "The Steve Wozniak-designed computer".
The by-name callouts in the video are:
- "hand-built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak"
- "in Steve Job's mom's garage."
- Jobs acting as a salesman
I'm not really sure how Jobs is emphasised at all.
There's a certain type of nerd that just can't stand Jobs and seems to have a complex about the archetypes that Jobs and Woz represent.
Fair enough! Guilty of that attitude, no doubt. I note the corrections in the message above re emphasis on Woz/Jobs.
I think mostly I was annoyed at the emphasis on how the computer is untouched and unused, which seemed the antithesis of the spirit of those early days.
Having said all that, I really felt an urge to bid, though no doubt it's 10x what I can afford.
I worked on the original Mac OS as a 3rd party developer and tester. One of my perks was getting the entire original developer and design team to sign the inside of my original Mac case with felt tip pens. I kind of forgot about it, and when getting my Mac serviced for some reason, the Mac selling computer store stole the case, the police reluctantly got involved, not understanding shit, and it was a whole "thing". The original signed case as never recovered.
If you are interested in handmaking a replica, some enthusiasts have already replicated the PCB design and there is a zip archive with Gerber files floating around: https://www.applefritter.com/content/apple-1-replica-gerber-...
From what it looks like, the difficulty shouldn't be in getting a board made or soldering them, but sourcing the parts. Other than the odd 74 series ICs, the design includes some (I think memory?) chips that are nowadays more difficult to find than the 6502 & 6520.
I bet you can run the entire thing in CircuitJS and it would still be faster than the original.
Number crunching performance is definitely what people building Apple 1 replicas are aiming for.
yeah, 0.003$ MCU can run it.
Not sure if it was already posted here (most likely), and it's for a C64 but: https://youtu.be/MG3j_6DBCIE
Cassandra, the woman in the video, is a super interesting person. She essentially created the ‘nerd stuff’ auction market at sothebys, including enigma machines, tons of space stuff, she managed the Feynman estate auction..
I’d guess she is planning on making a market for this early Apple gear based on the video. Will the auction result pay for the video? Probably not, but they get to set the market price and be the auction house of record for this going forward, and that could be quite valuable.
I hate lies, i hate manipulations.
Sothebys will be paid in multiples of what that video cost to make. How did you come up with opposite ? Most auction houses take 10- 30 % of price. So youre saying that this computer will cost less than 30k at final price ?
Also, Apple Computer was founded in 1976. But there were already "home" / personal computers sold from other companies for half of decade already. Or you can say that Apple employees did not built Apple-1 computer with already available intel 8008 CPU. Apple employees at that time were not innovators, they were marketers and solder monkeys.
Yes wikipedia is edited by public, and it is confusing on purpose. Apple has billions of dollars, so marketing department got paid to increase confusion on wikipedia articles for all apple products.
By charting computer history on timeline, you can see Apple-1 computer was nothing exceptional. It was just another random kit.
Apples push to sell to gullible teachers was toxic marketing strategy, which worked. So peoples exposed to this brand of computers in schools had emotional attachment to this brand. Yes apple targeted children. Not in China, in USA.
> https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2025/history-of-scie...
> Estimate: 400000-600000 USD
> Current Bid: 350000 USD
Apple 1 sold for $666.66 in 1976, which is ~$3766 today after inflation, so ~900x increase in value.
For comparison, AAPL stock went public in 1980-12-12 at $22 per share. Adjusting for 5 splits, the initial IPO price was $0.10. It's at $210.86 today.
Honestly, even if I had the money, I'd be too afraid to use it. I'd get one of the replica boards.
Those electrolytic capacitors will eventually need replacing. At that point you have to ask yourself if the value will be diminished more by replacing them (with as close to a vintage cap as you can find) to keep it running, or by letting it become nonoperational.
Does Apple have one of these? It seems they definitely have the money to buy it.
There was one on display at their original campus for a while but i believe it was donated to the Computer History Museum
Maybe they spent it all on the Birkin bag?
If they do, I’m considering Severance a documentary.
Poor Woz perpetually haunted by Steve’s shadow.
His departure from Apple feels like potent foreshadowing of the Apple Steve envisioned. I remember feeling confused hearing the Apple II story growing up, but as I mature in the industry I really empathize with Woz's lack of patience for bad administration. Feels likely that Steve coveted that attitude, maybe a bit too much for an impromptu business administrator.
Apple is unabashedly, outwardly, privacy focused. Just their law enforcement policies put them way ahead of their competitors. But this argument usually deteriorates to "they are all the same!" so I won't even bother making a case for them.
What I will say that if Apple is what Woz feared. Then what's OpenAI and X/Grok and Google and Facebook (hell bench on world domination)? Unimaginable?
Chorus They are all the same! Chorus
Apple helped create the black rectangle monolith appliances-in-a-smartphone plague. But they are not even in the top 10 list of companies I'm currently worried about. They are far more embarrassing than dangerous as of late.
I think you are attributing to choice what can easily be explained by contigent circumstances.
Apple is privacy focused because it's a lifestyle and tech fashion company that competes with internet data brokers. Apple's instincts for monopoly power, locking down the market and choking life out of their complements is second to none.
Given the opportunity, all successful tech CEOs are bred and selected to burn the world down if the result is aligned to their power goals.
I don't see it as choking the life out of anything. They started in blank slate era of PCs. They grew as a compnay developing many human centric details for computing. They have a group of customers that like that approach and that is who they cater to. They just want to play in their own sandbox. The desire to control their own sandbox and customers is not aggressive. Their success with customers is a reaction to that. The fact that they keep some developers ideas at arms length is not aggressive. They support development with a different set of criteria than the mass market.
It’s both. Steve was who he was. Tim was a gay man in an era when the fbi would blackmail you over your choices. The product decisions and enterprise decisions aren’t made in a vacuum.
I'm kinda torn between the Birkin bag and this.
Go with the bag, since there is no evidence to support these claims by Sotheby's
Based on historical records, the evidence suggests that only less than 150 to 200 Apple-1 computers were ever made and the assembly team was Wozniak who did most technical assembly, with help from Daniel Kottke, Patty Jobs (Steve's sister), and occasional friends.
Also....the actual video title is: "The Finest Operational Apple-1 Computer in Existence - Handmade by Steve Jobs - Is Now at Sotheby's" an even more wild claim. Then editorialized here to be called in the title of this submission: " Apple-1 Computer, handmade by Jobs and Woz"
The video has low credibility, and changing the title wont change that.
Jobs role has always been reported as business/sales focused rather than hands-on assembly.
Handmade by Jobs, not Woz?
...and Wozniak.
Yeah, the video mentions both names. Whoever made the title didn't include Wozniak, but the video definitely does.
We updated the title to credit both, thanks!
That's awesome; making the world a better place one title diff at a time haha.
[dead]
[Insert obligatory personal although almost meaningless anecdotes about seeing Woz's castle-themed house when it was first built and almost running over SJ with my VW Westfalia.]
[And literally almost physically colliding into Tim Cook in Los Altos where Garage Technology Ventures used to be.]
[If you need someone important ran into accidentally, I guess that's about my only natural talent.]