Glad to see that you're still safe and healthy. Also, whoever thinks that these old machines that we love so much think that they're worth a mortgage or 5 needs to *not* share whatever it is they decide to smoke. Totally ridiculous prices...
Thank you! Although given how many vintage computers I've collected.. I'm not sure I am indeed healthy.. :) Yes prices have definitely gotten out there. I can understand it in some situations.. a C65 prototype just sold for $17k today, but I do kinda question an Apple Lisa going for $55k or a SN 3500ish Apple II going for $5k and wonder if the rise can sustain itself.
Wait what? This is crazy. Late to show but I live in Albuquerque, home of Altair, Intel, some labs, etc. I used to go to this crazy Goodwill junk warehouse in 2001-2005, where everyday I would score a car full of vintage computers. At one point - and I'm not kidding - I had like 30 Apple II's, 40 Compaq Portable suitcases, Kaypros, an Apple Lisa or two, over 10 NEXT boxes, Amigas, DEC's, IBM PC ad 5155's, tons of old floppies, MS 1.0's, and a crazy weird Ohio Scientific rusted box that sold for more than all those others combined. Sun Microsystems everything for some reason, I would leave those behind usually. Didn't sell. A computer museum was a big buyer, as were Germans and Japanese. I am not very knowledgeable, just a seller. Most was not very rare or special, but there was lots of it. My point? Towards the end of 2004 I suddenly found NOTHING. Not one computer. I ask why? They were all getting recycled, for scrap metal and plastic. All of them. End of that. Saddening. May explain why old computers are getting bid up like this now. (They also said there was a problem with people not wiping their drives. I can confirm I saw many family pictures, really bad poetry, porn, banking statements, household budgets, unfinished novels, medical records, and even more bad poetry. No idea people were writing so much poetry in this country). Real easy money was selling a specific clicky IBM AT keyboard or the smaller "hacker" ones to Japan for about 120 bucks a pop. I found about ten a month. Some were the beam sprung, and I see them today at 900 bucks? Finally, on a tangent, I found night vision goggles, kinda old looking but still kinda worked. Stuck it up for 800 bucks, you never know, and it sold in ten seconds. Buyer? Department of Defense. I asked what was the deal? These were some kind of first generation something, on a list of products not to be sold, bought, or sold to anyone overseas. They have an alert. DOD paid immediately, no problem with me selling them as long as it was to them, and I always wondered what they might have paid?
I thought the peak of the market for vintage computer came in the early 2000's, before the tech bubble crash. I sold a ton of stuff then for what I thought were ridiculous prices. Today, the magazines are pretty much selling for the same prices. But the hardware has gone through the roof in pricing! Stuff that you couldn't give away in the 1980's, and worth hundreds in the early 2000's is now in the thousand dollar plus range.
Yeah its been very.. suspicious. I'm tempted to say covid stimulus money but part of me half seriously wonders if there's money laundering or some other thing going on in some cases. Doesn't seem to be.. Ive occasionally known the winning bidder on an item and literally they just paid a premium. One guy bought an atari falcon pilot unit from me for $2k on ebay, immediately flipped for $3k. Its fascinating but also kinda absurd I think.. at some point the value of all this stuff has to come down I would think as attrition eats away at both machines and people.
Thank-you for the insight into Apple II collecting. Personally, I cannot imagine paying the equivalent of 4 or 5 months rent for _anything_ hobby-related, but I am also fixated on saving for my early retirement, so I am reluctant to buy anything not essential. I love your spreadsheet. Much sales data is not publicly available after a very short time. Personally, I did something similar years ago when I owned an investment property. I had like four years of sales data for the immediate neighborhood when the time came to sell the house. I had more focussed/comprehensive data than the realtor!
No I am also becoming reluctant to spend big $$$. In some areas the hobby has actually gotten a little cheaper but stuff like the Rev 0 Apple II continues to march upwards. I sort of wonder if this is really sustainable as the generations that grew up with this stuff get older and pass on. And no problem re the sales tracking.. I really hate that ebay doesn't have a way of keeping that info longer, and that you have to pay a third party like Worthpoint to get it otherwise.
@@TechTimeTraveller It's like housing these days. The prices are crazy high but if you own one, it's value is also high so you can sell it to buy another. Maybe you have some parts you can sell to help pay for your habit. :)
I actually sold a Rev 02 I had to help pay for my Rev 0. I've occasionally actually made money on these things myself. I figure my Rev 0 has probably picked up some value. I have been trying to thin my collection a bit and reclaim some space. But I tend to just take the proceeds and reinvest in other equipment. :)
@@TechTimeTraveller I dont think it is sustainable. As you indicate, our generation are the ones that are sentimental for this sort of thing and aside from museums or some such the demand will reduce as time goes by. I have my amiga 1000 with its original box from when I was young, and have considered selling it, but I just cant part with it. Eventually it will loose its resale value however, as the amiga generation will be smaller and smaller. I grew up on the apple II and II+/e and would be thrilled to have one as I remember it well, in my dads office, but I am not going to spend those bucks. I am glad I found your channel. Thank you for posting your computer adventures.
I think the real genius behind Apple was Wozniak and not Jobs. I really don't get why people, are paying so much for basically, junk. It's because of someone that is willing to pay 3500$ for an incomplete, probably defective board, that the prices are getting higher everyday.
I think they both had their strengths and weaknesses. Without Jobs the Apple 1 and 2 probably wouldn't have existed as finished products... Woz might have just given away the design to hobbyists instead of working to build a company. Without Woz's innovation Jobs might not have had the groundbreaking products he needed to lift Apple above the others. I think they were fairly complimentary at the beginning.
i made my own rev 0 from scratch and upgraded it with instructions from the woz wonderbook, added color killer, extended colors and power on reset. total cost was about 400 bucks.
I agree I think it has something to do with the II+ in general. I'm not sure about the BH because they had their own serials and they're all low.. but I had a working theory that Apple tried to stop production on the II when the plus came out, and maybe backed off and resumed when some complained? So you start at 60k just to differentiate internally between the originals and post resumption or something.
That much, for a board with no chips?!? Seems bonkers to me. Getting all the date matched chips would be so hard / expensive. (Spoken as a Lisa collector...)
My collage roommate ordered and paid for an Apple 1, he got a letter telling him he could pay an additional $250 for the Apple II (Rev 0) OR receive a refund for the Apple 1. He paid the $250 and I got to play with it the first day he got it!!! We dug through the schematics and played with the working board. Ge also got an original case a few weeks later. It looked hand sanded and finished.
That is an awesome story. I wondered about those early board-only buyers. He must have gotten a ventless case. I assume he didn't keep it? Would have been worth a lot now. And too bad he missed on the Apple 1 and didn't get the chance to keep one.. that would have been an incredible investment. Do you recall if you guys played any games with his II in the early days?
@@TechTimeTraveller As soon as he got it running (with me kibitzing over his shoulder) we were playing simple example programs. The graphics were very interesting! Woz did more with less than anyone I had ever seen. I didn't think much of the quality of the display. I spent hours poring over the schematics trying to understand how it worked. Skipping around strangely through RAM and cutting corners to reduce the hardware and "force" the Apple II to generate a NTSC compatible color video signal from about 5 ICs. My S100 system with 64x16 char video card had over 40 ICs at the time. As you say in your video the ringing and noise from his design drove the TV nuts. It couldn't handle the color signal. I haven't talked to Russel for years, don't know if he still has it. It was a veltless case, I got the impression his was one of the first delivered, maybe first dozen or so. Packaging and pilot production run parts looked like a low budget garage operation!! Hummmm..... But we both knew Apple was way beyond the competition for home/hobby systems. There were definitely 2 markets at this time, the business systems like Polymorfic Mits AMSI and others then there was Apple.... The floppy drives my roommate got a few months later after frustrating delay apology letters were even more of a Woz minimal hack! Click BUZZ clatter with no head position sensors and almost no electronics.
Oh GOD I hate where the hobbyist collector's market has been going. Things I used to be able to find for a couple bucks are now having prices driven up totally artificially. There's SOME things definitely worth a lot of money, but those of us that have been collecting for decades know price fixing when we see it.
I picked up an original Apple II at the beginning of the pandemic for about $45. It was a total freak find - I don't even have any automated alerts or anything, I just manually search for old computers on the local news's classified website now and then and got excruciatingly lucky. It came from a couple who found it up in their parent's attic when cleaning it out for an estate sale. They had actually used it when they were younger. It is in decent shape but the power supply is dead and I haven't gotten around to fixing it to see if the rest of it works. If it does, I will definitely be selling it to acquire a more capable (and cheaper) Apple II model and save the rest of the money, as while it is an awesome artifact, to me I'd rather have a user with some more features. It is about the only good retro computer find I've had locally in about 20 years though.
Was offered a crapload of apple 2 stuff about 15 years ago for nothing but because I had nowhere to store it I refused. IIRC it consisted of atleast two apple 2, one 2+ and about 4 spare boards a couple atleast had those light green slots. Along with various plug in boards, couple of monitors, disk drives and cassette players and quite literally a large filing cabinet full of software and manuals. Talk about regretting decisions, I could of had atleast one rev 0 board along with other stuff rare today. Chances are most it went to landfill as the owner was moving abroad and had little time to dispose of it all. 🙁
I had same problem. Two working early apples two floppy disc drives loads of plug in boards and two cub monitors. Plus a load of development boards I got a miserable £400. Oh dear! So many regrets.
It's gotta be somebody who's new to the hobby, has some disposable cash and wants one but doesn't realize it's missing it's chips and also doesn't realize how much has been done to it
This is a prime example of how out of hand the collecting hobby around the early micros is getting, I've seen god damn VAX and PDP machines go for less than some of the Apple ][ stuff has been going for. That's just scary to think that you can get into Mini computers for the prices that some of these micros are going for.
It's crazy for prices now, been looking for a Tandy model 100/102, there were millions of these made and there are always multiples on ebay but all over $100, I'd think 50-60 is fair. If you send an offer, all you get back is a counter 5 bux off the listed price or no response at all. Forget anything Amiga, the prices are CrAzY!
great and very informative video. Good to know prices and rare versions. I'm glad I got one Apple II JPlus to collect, it seems there aren't many around :)
Great video and information! I still have my old Apple II (circa 1979/1980) with raised power light and was wondering what it might be worth these days. It is SN A2S1-10674. I think its kind of a Frankenstein, cause my dad upgraded it and added aftermarket stuff to it. Motherboard date is 8034 and power supply is A2M001-12226 (silver). It has a Microsoft RAM card and one of those Sup "R" Mod II card (I think its a TV interface). Also has two disk drives A2M0003, a Toshiba monochrome monitor and a bunch of manuals, programmers guides and literature. I turned it on and it still works! A couple of the keys are not working though. Brought back quite a few memories.
Really doesn't make sense for Apple 2's to be valued this much. They were everywhere in the 80s, I'd rather rarer/less successful machines get this sort of attention.
It's the nostalgia value. Rich old guys want to get their first computer back to play with. Money is not an object. Sure, the Ohio Scientific was rarer and in some respects a cooler machine (for the gear head) from the same era, but you can have them for a fraction of the price. To be honest though, the Apple II was possibly the most user friendly and capable machine of it's time. The OSI C1P/Challenger, released the same year as the Apple II was a lot cheaper but was far less capable and more rudimentary. Hence it's greater obscurity today.
I do kinda love my OSI gear a bit more than my Apple gear. Kind of a root-for-the-underdog thing. I have an OSI 300, C1P/600, C2-4P, C2-8P, C4-4P, C8 .. they're just so... homey. Sadly OSI never had the cash to really invest in their own custom chips. But they're a really fun computer to hack around on and they look fanastic. Steel case = unbreakable also. :)
Look at what is happing in console game collecting and wata rare is no longer valuable to new collectors its just about things that are icons i will say that this rev 0 apple should be worth more than average because it has noticeable differences compared to later ones but not this much.
@@belstar1128 Not entirely sure what you are trying to say here as you have left out a lot of punctuation and capitalization .. but .. things don't become 'icons' by default. They need to have some sort of lasting consumer interest fist. In the case of the Apple II that interest comes from it being capable and user friendly for the day. Hence it's popularity, it's retro appeal .. and it's entry into the 'icon' realm.
Nice original REV 0 Apple II mother board ... Try buying an Apple II with one of these mother boards already in the system. If you want to see something go for a lot of money. WOW !!! $3374 ... Just think how much a working REV 0 would go for... I guess I will just have to stick to my REV 3... LOL!!!
The really sad thing is that probably a lot of this expensive retro computer equipment will end up being trashed in the coming years, as Gen X and Xennials die and their families think that the equipment is worthless. Think about that... thousands of dollars of retro equipment destroyed because of the ignorance of spouses and offspring. Of course some people OVERvalue common junk (and they all show up on fleabay), but many more are still ignorant that retro computer prices skyrocketed in the last few years.
I suspect you're right. That's another reason why I've become cautious about paying $$$$ for vintage machines lately. I have a bet that as the generations with living memory of this stuff pass, values will plummet and the amount of stuff needing homes and not finding them will go through the roof.
Hell no!! These people are definitely smoking something. Vintage computers are cool, but not THAT cool! There is no way I would ever pay that much even if I had the money!
So what do you reckon the depopulated board is actually worth as-is - a hundred bucks? If it had been populated I don't feel it was that bad of a price. They are history, after all. Edit: I'd never buy one. I didn't like them when they came out - I was a BBC Micro guy over in England at the time.
I was thinking a little under a grand. It *was* a light green slot Rev 0 and it's the first one I've seen loose in eons. I get why someone would be tempted to buy it.. if you have a Rev 0 that was upgraded obviously this is the only way to get back to originalish. But really, you'd never be able to match it to the original chassis and none of the ICs will be original. Just didn't seem like a $3k proposition to me.
Theres another doing the same thing. It is insane. I’d love to get my hands on just about any old computer (and once had a whole bunch of them…apple, atari, timex, etc), but ebay has made it all but impossible unless you happen to run into someone just wanting to get rid of old “junk”… which i have yet to accomplish… lol. I just cant justify the expense for myself. Ymmv.
Random thought that could be interesting regarding the missing serials... I guess they could have been a serial range that got put aside for a secret government contract or something... like the kind of thing where they would not allow any hardware to leave the site and would just completely destroy it when either the project is terminated or the hardware is no longer useful. If that was to be the case, these missing serials probably would be the only trace of this and it would likely not be provable. Ok, enough tinfoil hat stuff for tonight haha
Holy moly! I hoped to buy an Apple II GS for under US$ 200. Darnit. Oh, well I've never had an Apple product in my life. Perhaps never will. I think now is the best time to hunt the late PowerPC Mac laptop from mid--2000s, before those get expensive for some reason. Apple fanboys are weird.
Its understandable that people would pay a lot of money for a rare computer but this one is broken and stripped of all its components so its really pointless to spend much on it.
Makes me wish my Dad would let me take and sell the old Apple IIE that's just been gathering dust in our climate controlled storage unit. It belongs in a museum, not gathering dust!
Ha ha, that's insane. You also get the morons who put stupid prices on items they think are rare but ar'nt. I saw a cassette with an asking price of £1999.99. It had 6 games for a light gun on the ZX Spectrum. No gun, no Spectrum, just the tape, and it is'nt rare. LOL.
as an apple hater I love how Woz claims amnesia whenever he gets a "hard question" yet he has no problems remembering his excuses or why it wasnt his fault whenever he wants :D
"Oh no, another ebay complainer. Shut up and don't discuss the shady practices on ebay, you don't have to use it. Just start your own auction site.. Mods, delete this post!" -Vintage computer forum eBay sellers. Ebay is not an auction site, it is either a game of skill or a game of who has the fastest bid sniper.
