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
It all started with a simple errand. According to NBC Bay Area's original reporting on the story, a woman believed to be in her 60s or 70s drove to a recycling center called CleanBayArea in Milpitas, California. She had a bunch of old electronic boxes to get rid of. She said her husband had recently passed away and she wanted to clear out the garage. Staff asked if she wanted a receipt for the drop-off but she said no. She left no name or even a number. She just wanted the clutter to be gone. Two weeks later, a recycling manager was sorting through the donated boxes when he noticed something strange. Under a pile of old keyboards, wires and a stereo sat a wood-grained circuit board. No case, no keyboard, no monitor of its own. At first, the staff thought it was a fake. It turned out to be an Apple-1.
Why an old circuit board fetched six figures
The Apple-1 was Apple's first product. In 1976, 200 of these computers were produced: the boards were hand-built primarily by Steve Wozniak, while Steve Jobs handled sales; Ron Wayne, the company's third co-founder, sold his stake and left just twelve days after Apple's founding, well before that production run. The initial price of the computer was $666.66. Today, only a few dozen are believed to survive, many in museums and private collections. CleanBayArea sold the donated Apple-1 to a private collector for $200,000, as reported at the time by NBC Bay Area, CNN, and Reuters. It was a large markup for a machine that almost went to the dump, but it was still below the record price for the model. In October 2014, another Apple-1 was sold at a Bonhams auction for $905,000 to the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, according to reporting at the time.
