An Apple-1 computer handmade by Steve Jobs will be auctioned in New York next Thursday, July 17, when it is expected to make as much as $600,000.
The machine is the “Romkey” Apple-1 and is said to be the best-known working example of 50 pioneering computers hand-made by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
It will be sold as the star lot in Sotheby’s “Geek Week” sale, History of Science & Technology.

A close-up of the circuit board that make the first home computer tick. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.
The opening bid is $300,000 with an estimate range of $400,000 to $600,000.
That’s a steep price for a pioneering machine that is technically incredibly rudimentary by today’s standards.
But it’s a pioneer.
Wozniak and Jobs’ Apple-1 is the first home computer in the modern sense. Before they created one of history’s biggest companies, computers were self-built by dedicated hobbyists and experts. And, the Silicon Valley also helped to push the display envelope by adding video display terminal circuitry. We’re on the way to monitors and mice.
The Apple-1 changed the world.
Like most “sudden” leaps, the Apple-1 was some time in the making. Wozniak and Jobs had already partnered on an electronic project – an illegal phone hacking device.

The Apple-1 was the first computer to have this now universal look. Earlier computers used lights to communicate. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.
In March 1975, Wozniak used an MITS Altair 8800 for the first time. While he liked it, he thought adding a keyboard and screen for input and feedback would revolutionise the machine.
He was right.
They sold 50 units to the Byte Shop, an early computer retailer, and assembled them in Jobs’ parents’ garage.
This machine is one of those machines. Its first buyer traded it to Tom Romkey, who at the time owned a computer store in Florida. Romkey gave his customer an NCR PC and safely stored the Apple-1.

Steve Jobs as a school student in 1972, just a few years before he was soldering circuit boards in his parents’ garage.
In September 2015, Romkey sold it for $365,000.
That is not a record for an early Apple.
In 2014, an Apple-1 motherboard was auctioned for $905,000.
Another example nicely illustrates the vertiginous rise in prices for these machines.
The Rick Conte machine is named for a hobbyist who bought his Apple-1 from Stan Veit, a pioneering New York seller, probably at a convention. Conte paid $995. In 2008 he listed it for sale for $15,000.
In 2019 it was auctioned for around $470,000.
The Romkey Apple-1 sale will be very closely watched across the tech community and is likely to test that top estimate.