Christie's Auctioning Apple I for $300,000+

For diehard Apple fanatics, Christie’s latest auction, “First Bytes: Iconic Technology from the Twentieth Century,” is one not to be missed as one of the lots is an original Apple I. This Apple I, one of the first Apple computers ever built, comes from 1976 and consists of an 11” by 14” green plastic apparatus covered by an array of memory chips. Roughly 200 examples were built, of which only 30 to 50 are known to still exist. The Apple I offered eight kilobytes of memory when it debuted, just a tiny fraction of the memory of today’s computers. While the starting bid is set at $300,000 — roughly 450 times more than its initial retail price of $666.66 USD — pre-sale estimates have this particular Apple I going for as much as $500,000 USD. Other Apple I computers to hit the auction block in the last year have gone for anywhere from $300,000 to $650,000+ USD.