This is the weirdest auction of Steve Jobs memorabilia we’ve ever seen

How would you like to own a ribbon cable once owned by Steve Jobs? Or how about a heat sink? What about his boyhood collection of bow ties?

These are just three of about 200 items associated with the Apple co-founder currently being auctioned online to celebrate Apple’s 50th anniversary.

Entitled “Steve Jobs & the Computer Revolution: The Apple 50th Anniversary Auction,” the collection of weird auction stuff is more interesting than usual. It provides a glimpse inside Jobs’ childhood home and the legendary Silicon Valley garage where Apple was born. There’s also Apple’s very first check, expected to go for a cool half million.

Steve Jobs memorabilia: Apple 50th anniversary auction

Over the years, several auctions have sold off early Apple or Steve Jobs memorabilia. But because Jobs famously refused to sign autographs (as he once spelled out in an autographed letter), the usual types of items that often get sold at auctions — autographed stuff — are rare. Most auctions of old Apple gear tend to peddle old Apple-1 computers. They’re coveted by collectors for their historical significance as Apple’s first product and their rarity — only 200 were ever made, and only about 80 still exist.

This latest auction, which runs online through January 29, contains far more personal Jobs memorabilia than usual. A lot of it comes from Steve Jobs’ stepbrother, who inherited the contents his parent’s home after their passing. 

It is being run by RR Auction, a Boston-based house known for rare documents and historical artifacts, such as a wristwatch that went to the moon ($1.625 million), Bonnie and Clyde’s guns ($500,000), and one of Johnny Ramone’s guitars ($937,500).

Previously, RR Auction sold an Apple-1 prototype used by Steve Jobs for $677,196, and Apple’s second check.

Among the 196 items currently for sale are 55 pieces of Apple marketing memorabilia, 35 old iPhones, iPods or iPads, a couple of Elon Musk items, and a first-generation iPhone jailbroken by famed hacker Geohot.

Apple’s first check

The top item in the 50th anniversary auction is likely a Wells Fargo check for $500 signed by Jobs and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The auction house expects it to go for $500,000 or more.

The check is made out to an engineer who worked at Atari (as did Jobs and Wozniak for a while) as payment for laying out the first Apple-1 motherboard.

“What makes this check extraordinary is that it predates Apple’s partnership agreement,” said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction, in a statement. “It was written weeks earlier, at the exact moment Jobs convinced Wozniak to sell his calculator, open an account at Wells Fargo, and start building a company.”

So far, it’s attracted no bids.

Amusingly, the auction also includes the fledgling company’s first bank statement, which showed it rounding out the month with about $140 in the account.

Apple-1 prototype motherboard #0

The highest bid so far is for an early prototype Apple-1 motherboard, currently sitting at $50,000 with a single bid.

RR Auction describes it as the earliest known fiberglass Apple-1, a “pre-production board used to validate the Apple-1 design prior to commercial release, regarded by experts as ‘board number zero.'”

The auction house hopes it will sell for more than $500,000, too.

Items saved by Steve Jobs’ stepbrother

The auction also features several items from the personal collection of Steve Jobs’ stepbrother, John Chovanec, who became related after the death of Jobs’ mother in the nineties. Jobs’ widowed dad eventually remarried, and his new wife’s grown-up son (Chovanec) instantly became related to a Silicon Valley titan. After Jobs passed in 2011, Chovanec inherited items from the tech pioneer’s childhood home.

According to RR Auction, these items are “artifacts gifted directly by Jobs and preserved for decades within the family, offering an intimate view of his formative years.”

One eye-catching piece of Steve Jobs memorabilia is Jobs’ bedroom desk, which includes some assorted papers from Hewlett-Packard, Atari and Reed College. Someone — presumably Jobs himself — scratched some marks onto its surface, including the name of his sister, Patricia. It currently sits at $5,500 (with two bids).

There are also 12 bow ties from Steve Jobs’ boyhood bedroom closet, a small collection of 8-track tapes featuring Jobs’ favorites Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and an old Apple business card with a handwritten note to his dad: “Hi, I’m back.”

The auction runs through January 29. View the full catalog and register to bid at RR Auction.

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.

Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.

He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.

Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.

Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.

Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.

Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.

Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.

Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.

He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.

Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.

You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.