First and only Apple 1 computer ever sold by Steve Jobs, bought at auction

Only few months after one of the few surviving original Apple 1 computers assembled by Steve Wozniak was sold, for a staggering $905,000, the very first Apple 1 ever sold by Steve Jobs, in 1976, in his parents’ garage, has been acquired for $365,000 at an auction in Sacramento, CA.

The Ricketts Apple 1, named after its very first owner, Charles Ricketts, and then owned by Ted Perry, a school psychologist, was kept in a cardboard box in Perry’s home outside Sacramento, until Perry decided to put the computer up for auction at Christie’s auctions house in London.

The computer, hand-crafted by Steve Wozniak in 1976, was one of 200 units, of which only 50 are known to have survived. Its price was originally estimated by Christie’s between $400,000 and $600,000.

The Apple 1 came in with a monitor and a wooden case, containing the Apple 1 motherboard, a keyboard, a cassette player used for demonstrations, original paperwork documentation, and the original voided checks used for the transaction between Steve Jobs and his customer, making the unit the only one in existence whose sale documentation appears intact.

The first historical Apple “leak”

Among the few items also part of the auction: the original manual for the Apple 1, proof of the original company logo, and the design plans for the Apple II case, which, while not a specifically contributing factor for the price, it makes for the first “unofficial” leak of a “future” Apple product.