Apple I discarded as junk sells for $200k; mystery woman stands to get half | Hacker News Reader

Apple I discarded as junk sells for $200k; mystery woman stands to get half

mercurynews.com

208 pointsmmastrac69 comments

A similar thing happened to my uncle Paul (Terrell)... after he moved to Portland, he had an Apple I (part of the original run of 50 he famously bought) and many other ancient 8-bit computers, like Exidy Sorcerers, in a garage my cousin was using. One day my cousin got frustrated by the "junk" and hauled a bunch of it away to the dump.

I believe my uncle still has one more bare motherboard squirreled away somewhere -- it used to hang on his wall in a plexiglass case as art.

Oh, my sympathies...

by a weird coincidence, i was just watching a video where steve jobs talks about that early sale of the 50 computers. it is interesting in its own right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKlc4m5D50

Have not seen that before, thanks! 1980 was only a few years after.

You can't really blame the woman, something so old doesn't shout "Hey I'm worth hundreds of thousands!" to most people. But I am glad people at the depot recognized its value and didn't actually recycle it.

You can blame her. I can't count the reports of such cases, where they throw away valuable things, just because they're not all chrome and shiny.

I compute! I am recycled! I compute again!

You are witnessed!

What? 99% of electronics from the 80s and 90s are utterly worthless. As far as the odds go, she was entirely correct to throw the thing out.

I have so many old computers/electronics. I can guarantee I couldn't pay someone (other than garbage collection) to take them, let alone make money off them.

had to reread this title like 10 times. kept reading it as "Apple [that] I discarded...." and kept trying to find that angle in the article.

finally cracked the mystery, felt epicly stupid.

Same, intentional clickbait title. A decent editor would not have allowed that through. "Discarded Apple I sells for $200k; mystery woman stands to get half". Not difficult.

Or perhaps a decent editor (of this Buzzfeed era) came up with it.

Decent at being obnoxious.

That's stretching the idea of clickbait quite a bit. "Mystery woman gets rid of old computer, you won't believe how much it sold for!" is the one baiting clicks. Current title is just an unfortunate arrangement of words.

> That's stretching the idea of clickbait quite a bit.

He was probably just using that term mistakenly, what a troll.

Wait, what? Who are you calling a troll?

Woosh!

It's a joke about misusing terminology.

So far over my head I didn't even feel the breeze from its passing.

I missed it too... so far over my head I frowned and muttered something about chemtrails.

I don't believe it's stretching. People specifically click through to that article to hear the first hand experience of the person who dumped an Apple I. There's an interesting angle to the story in this version; the actual article posted is void of any such angle of interest.

Let me know when you find a decent editor on the internet. Even quality publications like Ars let countless its/it's and sentences without verbs sneak through.

I hope they find her, a $100K isn't anything to sneeze at.

I did go to a garage sale in the Bay Area where an older couple there had the manuals for an Altair 8800 which they kept because they thought they might have some historical value to someone but threw out the hardware because it wasn't really useful to anyone. But over the years it is very hard to know what will and what won't become collectible in the future.

Back before Jobs turned Apple around you would be lucky to get $500 for an old Apple I, after all who wants the first computer of a failed computer company? :-)

These boards were $666 in 1976, about $4K in today's money. Plus you had supply a TV, power supply, keyboard, and punch tape reader. That was twice my income in those days.

Going by CPI it's actually about $2,800 in today's money. Still a significant amount of cash though.

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=666.00&year1=19...

I'm not fantastic at math, but I think that makes it about an 11.3% annual rate of return after inflation. That's not outrageous, but I'd take that investment.

How cool. Makes me wonder what might be worth more in today's disposable age.

Maybe ten years from now, old cellphones that had removable batteries will be in high demand, because a sun flare blew out all the modern ones. shrug

Didn't one of the boards sell for almost $1M recently? Did the market for them drop massively or did some fool over pay by $800k for an Apple I?

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2837776/vintage-apple-1...

$905,000, and presumably there's a premium for being in working condition. I think there's also a small market of people who have the money and care to spend it on this, so prices can fluctuate quite a bit.

Considering the time for the sales transaction taking place (2 days?), I'm sure if they took it to an auction house it would fetch a much higher price. There's only 50 ever made and it's from a household name that even the fashion houses respect.

On the other side of the story, this story is totally genius marketing (if intended). I've been hearing this firm's name all day including their policy of sharing proceeds with people who donate.

You may be right, but if you look at the history of sales recently, the prices are all over the place. This one's still pretty low in comparison, but if it isn't working, that could explain the difference. Or perhaps some of these came with accessories, like a cassette player.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#Collectors.27_item

5/13: $668K 6/13: $390K 11/13: $330K 10/14: $905K 12/14: $365K

I had some very old machines around, even if I am not even 30 yo, I love almost any kind of old machine I was able to collect.

I had a small collection since a couple of years ago composed by Sun Ultra-60, Next Workstation (working, but original HD was gone), Next Cube (never worked), Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Apple Macintosh (not working) and some others machines people were not interested anymore and I was able to collect for free. It was a quite good collection and funny to deal with in the spare time, but then, one day, my father decided to discard all of them because they were old and mostly broken. I was so disappointed it took me a while to realize it.

And that's why I like to eyeball the piles of junk on the side of the road waiting for collection by the council.

So far the best I've managed is a Commodore 64!

I read that as Apple "I" (as in me) discarded...

If they really can't find her, they should peruse the obits for her husband.

Edit: 3 downvotes and a bizarre reply to my comment about sexism. From the article, "He feels badly because the woman said her husband had died a couple of months earlier". How is my comment sexist? And how would you find the woman?

I curious about the 50/50 split? It looks like a relatively new company.(couldn't find a review on Yelp, and 50 plus like on Facebook). I went to Clean Bay Area, under 'How much money can I make?'; The answer was scarce, and I would need to email them for details.

Call me cynical, but while I feel this is a true story, I wonder if this is the first time they actually ponied up any money on donated equipment? That is without a firm agreement to buy before the drop-off, or pick-up?

This one Apple computer and their earnest attempt to find the woman and give her $100,000 sounds fishy? It sounds like it could be a PR move?

I could be wrong, and they always make good on their promise to split proceedes with customers 50/50?

I will probally never know--unless the company comes on here(HN), and describes the details, and discusses the 50/50 split? It would all be good marketing for an honest recycling company? Especially, a new one?

My main point, is I have dealt with antiques, collectables, etc.--for 20 years. I have never found a completely honest wholesale/picker/auction house/reseller/buyer? You have to keep a keen eye on All of them. If you want to donate to a supposedly good cause--just drop off the stuff. Just keep in mind even companies like Goodwill are loaded with huge internal theft problems. My local San Rafael Goodwill has fired at least three managers, that I know for internal theft. None of the managers were charged? Why? Maybe, because the nonprofit didn't want the bad publicity? They sure go after, customers caught stealing--with a vengeance? By the way--I see people buying too many products from Goodwill close to, or exceeding retail prices?

One manager was literally cherry picking the valuable donations and selling them out the back door. He was quite the happy entrepreneur--for awhile? Another was caught taking expensive jewelry out of the company safe, and yes Goodwill rehired her for some reason! I am not picking on Goodwill. I am actually hesitant to say anything because they have a lot of lawyers. Someone wrote a book on Goodwill, and no one bother to read it.

Just expect to get ripped off if you are not selling your stuff yourself. Hell, even the wealthy need to beware--I believe Christie's was found guilty of price fixing a few years ago? Oh yea, go through your stuff before tossing? I've seen a lot of people throwing away 1st edition books. I can go into most people homes and find something of value--they thought was junk.

Some people have empathy and integrity.

Url changed from http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/mystery-woman-dumps-2..., which points to this.

Turns out that website crashed all my tabs in Chrome. Never seen that one before.

Wow with that kind of payout I am surprised there aren't counterfeit chinese clones by now.

This isn't exactly a mystery. They know where the woman lives.

On what do you base that assertion?

http://cleanbayarea.com/portfolio/e-waste-recycling/

"Our electronic waste pick-up service is free for all residents of Northern California, CA."

OP is likely assuming they operate like my local dump/recycling center where they record my drivers license info every time I visit and drop something off (electronic or otherwise). Believe it or not they used to physically write down the data, now they swipe. Locally they don't tag what I drop off individually with my ID but they do have my ID on file as a visitor on a certain date.

I have no idea why they collect the data as opposed to mere verification. I suspect its something along the lines of a large difference between resident rates (free) vs business rates (if you have to ask, you can't afford it)

On what do you base that assumption?

I don't know how good that assumption is. I recently visited my local dump in Fairfax County, VA to drop off a used fire extinguisher and nobody recorded anything.

The article explicitly says he did not collect her information. Is the argument being made that he is lying about that detail of the story? To what end?

huh that's interesting, I missed that and in my mental model of op's theory, op obviously also missed it, for the model to make any sense.

I talked to a coworker and in his village they also gather visitor data, and for environmental reasons the recycle center will never turn hazmat away, ever, but the data is forwarded to the city who will lean very heavily on business owners who try to use free resident hazmat instead of paying for commercial hazmat disposal. With lead free solder and RoHS I wonder if some day we'll reclassify electronics (at least modern lead free electronics) as plain old garbage instead of hazmat.

There are, probably, many political ways to organize hazmat collection and its funding, some of which aren't going to make sense to outsiders.

No they don't.

From the article:

"In the future, he said, he'll be more insistent about getting donors' contact information."

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