Jobs-Built Apple Computer Auctioned for $400,000

One of the first Apple computers ever made has been auctioned in California for $400,000. The still-functioning device is one of 200 Apple 1 computers hand-built by Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. In 1976 such a device cost 666 dollars.

The auctioned computer is known as the Chaffey College Apple 1 because the original owner was a professor at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, also in California. He eventually sold the computer to a college student in 1977 to buy an Apple II.

The student, whose name has not been released by auction house John Moran Auctioneers, has kept the computer until now. The buyer’s name has not been disclosed.

Chaffey College is even rarer because it is largely encased in koa wood, a special wood from Hawaii. Only six of the original Apple 1s were made this way. It is estimated that there are still twenty Apple 1s that still work. One of these even fetched 905,000 dollars at an auction in New York in 2014.

The Apple 1 was the first Apple product to be sold in stores and came with a warranty. “It was guaranteed to work,” Corey Cohen, an Apple historian, told the Los Angeles Times. ‘Before that, there were other computers, but those were kits that didn’t always work.’ Cohen, therefore, calls Chaffey College ‘a sort of holy grail for collectors of vintage computers’.