An Apple I computer from the original batch of 50 that Jobs and Woz sold to the Byte Shop in 1976 will be put on the auctioning block in Germany next month. Early estimates claim that the computer could fetch between  $300,000 – $500,000 thanks to the original packaging and working condition of the unit.

Sir Jony Ive and famed designer Marc Newson have teamed up with Bono to a mega-auction of fancy master-pieces of design that will be sold to benefit (RED). Among the list of items up for grabs is a custom pair of Apple EarPods made of solid rose gold.

Jony and Marc actually did all the curation of the collection themselves over the past year, as well as collaborating on two custom made items – a  Leica Digital Rangefinder Camera, and an  aluminum desk produced by Neal Feay Studios. A total of 40 items will be auctioned off, including pieces from space travel, lighting, contemporary art and rare automobiles.

Here’s what Jony had to say about his contribution:

We’ve seen a couple of vintage Apple I computers auctioned off over the past year or so, each with an astronomically huge price tag. Another rare Apple I was sold at a Christie’s online auction today but this time the auction failed to reach its expected price.

The winner of the auction purchased the Apple I with its original manual, schematics and photo of Steve Jobs and Woz for $387,750.

While pocketing nearly 400 grand off an old dusty computer sounds like a pretty nice pay-day to most, the Apple I was expected to sell for as much as $500,000 according to pre-auction estimates, though it wasn’t expected to break the $671,400 price tag a working Apple I received in May.

Source: CNBC

Via: TUAW

While Apple is working to cut the price of iPhones and iPads to appeal to more consumers, vintage Apple gear keeps getting more valuable by the minute. This weekend a vintage Apple I computer, made in 1976, was sold at an auction for a record $671,400.

The auction beat the previous record price for an Apple I that was set at an auction house in Germany last November when someone snatched up a working Apple I for $640,000.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen quite a few Apple I’s hit the auction block. Some of the machines can be worth over half a million dollars, depending the item’s condition, and a new working Apple I is about to hit the auction block.

A German auctioneer is putting their rare, working Apple I computer up for auction later this month and hopes to make between $261,000 and $392,000.

That historic “grab a cuppa joe with Tim Cook” auction, which still has a couple of weeks to go and has already broken records, has had a little bit of a set back: credit card fraud that has set the auction back by thousands of dollars.

UPDATE: Bidding just reached $505,000!

Earlier this week we wrote about a Charitybuzz auction that will get you coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. At the time, the auction had reached $5,250, but its estimated value was just under ten times that amount at $50,000.

Just a few days later, the auction has received 68 bids and reached a whopping $295,000 with 18 days still to go. It’s now Charitybuzz’s biggest ever auction.

A working Apple I, the first computer built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976, has been sold at auction for a record $640,000. That’s considerably more than the machine’s original asking price of $666.66, and almost $270,000 more than the previous Apple I record set by Sotheby’s back in June.

Speculating in vintage computers isn’t exactly the same as putting money into a blue chip. Here’s the proof: a rare Apple I being sold at auction at Christie’s has just failed to make its minimum bid of 50,000 British pounds (or about $80,000), despite the fact that a similar machine sold for $374,500 in June.

The Apple I was the first computer built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs back in 1976. They only made 200 units, and sold them for $666.66, but if you happen to own one, you’re sitting on a small fortune.

An Apple I computer is set to be auctioned off at Christie’s on October 9th, and even though it’s inoperable, because it’s missing the required DRAM, the owner of the machine might get $126,000 for it.