In 2015, a woman dropped an Apple-1 at a California recycling center with old electronics without asking for a receipt; workers sold it for $200,000

Some of the world’s biggest fortunes might just be lying around in some junk drawers. According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2024, the world generated 62 billion kilograms of electronic waste in 2022, and less than a quarter of it was properly collected and recycled. In that mountain of “junk” was a very rare computer, and it nearly got lost in the pile. In April 2015, a woman in California showed just how easily that can happen.

The garage cleanout that led to a rare find