Christie's Auction House Is Turning Into a Secondhand Apple Store

The international auction house Christie’s, more often known for dealing fine art, is offering an online auction of early and rare Apple computers titled “First Bytes: Iconic Technology From the Twentieth Century.” The lot includes several prototypes, some software and most auspiciously a functional Apple I, with signatures from Steve Wozniak himself.

James Hyslop, a scientific specialist, worked on the sale of the last Apple I that passed through Christie’s, back in 2010. “It was the first Apple I to be sold at an international auction house," he said in a phone call from London. "That one made $210,000."

This Apple I is expected to fetch upwards of $500,000 because it is a rare 1976 computer that still works. Hyslop estimated that this could be just the seventh functional Apple I left.

“There was 200 or so that were originally made and not all of them were saved. As technology improved, [owners] threw them away when they got an upgrade,” Hyslop outlined a familiar tech story with a rare ending—the massive appreciation in value 37 years later.

“These things are so iconic and survival rates and condition aren’t always as wonderful as this offering that we’ve got coming are,” he said.

It’s strange to see prototypes for the computers I remember playing Number Munchers on in public school going up at Christie’s with a reserve price set at ten thousand bucks. I mean, I’m not even 30.

“These items that we’re so used to using as part of our daily lives still have huge stories to tell in the history of science,” Hyslop said, which was comforting until he made this comparison: “Another example of a calculating device is the slide rule. There are huge collectors of slide rules out there. There are still people around who remember that they had to get their engineer degrees or do their jobs with a slide rule. They didn’t have an electronic calculator.”

Rather than thinking of this as a new market, Hyslop views this a logical extension of what Christie’s has always done. This lot “fits in the long tradition of items related to the history of science that we’ve sold,” Hyslop said. “You could go back to a 16th century first edition of Copernicus or first edition Newton’s printing…this is a more modern part of that history.”

And while the Apple I is the iconic, proto-PC, artifacts from every era of computing are a growing market. Hyslop told me that Christie’s had just had offerings and memorabilia from Alan Turing that “performed exceptionally well at auction.”

What’s more puzzling is what will become of the “First Bytes” Apple II floppy disks, for two different word processors and the first spreadsheet computer program. On the one hand, it’s pretty funny that you can buy an Apple II and get the early ‘80s equivalent of Microsoft Office. On the other, how would a museum display software?

“That’s going to be an interesting thing to see, Hyslop said of the software. “To have it in its original packaging, that’s key, its original condition. It’s a wonderful and rare thing, it’ll be very interesting to see how well that does.”

The computers came from two separate private collections, and their fate will be determined by July 9, when the auction ends.

Thanks to a program that sold computers at a discount to people who worked for school districts, my family was an Apple family since the LC 475 came in and replaced our typewriter. It’s possible that the Mac graveyard we have growing in our basement isn’t depreciating into dust, but rather is maturing like a fine wine. “You can never predict what’s going to become the iconic collectable thing in the future,” Hyslop warned.

So, sorry, Mom. Dad might be right.