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Apple I discarded as junk sells for $200k; mystery woman stands to get half
- smaili 11y agoYou can't really blame the woman, something so old doesn't shout "Hey I'm worth hundreds of thousands!" to most people. But I am glad people at the depot recognized its value and didn't actually recycle it.
- informatimago 11y agoYou can blame her. I can't count the reports of such cases, where they throw away valuable things, just because they're not all chrome and shiny.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoI compute! I am recycled! I compute again!
- spiritplumber 11y agoYou are witnessed!
- untog 11y agoWhat? 99% of electronics from the 80s and 90s are utterly worthless. As far as the odds go, she was entirely correct to throw the thing out.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- xanderstrike 11y agoBut is it really worth $30-100 of your time? Especially if you don't know or care to know about craigslist or ebay?
- gibsonje 11y agoI have so many old computers/electronics. I can guarantee I couldn't pay someone (other than garbage collection) to take them, let alone make money off them.
- dang 11y agoUrl changed from http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/mystery-woman-dumps-200k-apple-1-computer-at-recycling-depot/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/mystery-woman-dumps-2..., which points to this.
- mikek 11y agoThis isn't exactly a mystery. They know where the woman lives.
- SwellJoe 11y agoOn what do you base that assertion?
- VLM 11y agohttp://cleanbayarea.com/portfolio/e-waste-recycling/ http://cleanbayarea.com/portfolio/e-waste-recycling/ "Our electronic waste pick-up service is free for all residents of Northern California, CA." OP is likely assuming they operate like my local dump/recycling center where they record my drivers license info every time I visit and drop something off (electronic or otherwise). Believe it or not they used to physically write down the data, now they swipe. Locally they don't tag what I drop off individually with my ID but they do have my ID on file as a visitor on a certain date. I have no idea why they collect the data as opposed to mere verification. I suspect its something along the lines of a large difference between resident rates (free) vs business rates (if you have to ask, you can't afford it)
- nicky0 11y agoOn what do you base that assumption?
- mikeash 11y agoI don't know how good that assumption is. I recently visited my local dump in Fairfax County, VA to drop off a used fire extinguisher and nobody recorded anything.
- SwellJoe 11y agoThe article explicitly says he did not collect her information. Is the argument being made that he is lying about that detail of the story? To what end?
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- michaelhoffman 11y agoThey don't have it anymore, so they can't return it to her.
- logn 11y agoIf they really can't find her, they should peruse the obits for her husband. Edit: 3 downvotes and a bizarre reply to my comment about sexism. From the article, "He feels badly because the woman said her husband had died a couple of months earlier". How is my comment sexist? And how would you find the woman?
- spcoll 11y agoHN's sexism at work as usual... The title of this submission is already pretty sexist. Had it been a man, his gender would not have been mentioned.
- haberman 11y agoWhat? How on earth is this sexist? EDIT: Ok, looking through your comment history I am less surprised. You do a disservice to the very real and prevalent instances of sexism when you play the card in situations where it clearly does not apply, like this.
- adventured 11y agoIt's not, the person was "triggered" by an artificially manufactured offense. Some people refer to it as outrage porn; the desire to seek even the smallest of possible things to generate anger, outrage, etc. which eventually becomes like an emotional addiction.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoPlease do not equivocate PTSD with offence. That is not what "triggered" means.
- CardenB 11y ago"Triggered" has become something of an Internet meme these days (via tumblr). That's what he is referring to. He was using quotes to highlight the irony.
- robterrell 11y agoA similar thing happened to my uncle Paul (Terrell)... after he moved to Portland, he had an Apple I (part of the original run of 50 he famously bought) and many other ancient 8-bit computers, like Exidy Sorcerers, in a garage my cousin was using. One day my cousin got frustrated by the "junk" and hauled a bunch of it away to the dump. I believe my uncle still has one more bare motherboard squirreled away somewhere -- it used to hang on his wall in a plexiglass case as art.
- msie 11y agoOh, my sympathies...
- allenbrunson 11y agoby a weird coincidence, i was just watching a video where steve jobs talks about that early sale of the 50 computers. it is interesting in its own right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKlc4m5D50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJKlc4m5D50
- robterrell 11y agoHave not seen that before, thanks! 1980 was only a few years after.
- aerovistae 11y agohad to reread this title like 10 times. kept reading it as "Apple [that] I discarded...." and kept trying to find that angle in the article. finally cracked the mystery, felt epicly stupid.
- developer1 11y agoSame, intentional clickbait title. A decent editor would not have allowed that through. "Discarded Apple I sells for $200k; mystery woman stands to get half". Not difficult.
- huac 11y agoOr perhaps a decent editor (of this Buzzfeed era) came up with it.
- ericlang 11y agoDecent at being obnoxious.
- lfowles 11y agoThat's stretching the idea of clickbait quite a bit. "Mystery woman gets rid of old computer, you won't believe how much it sold for!" is the one baiting clicks. Current title is just an unfortunate arrangement of words.
- EarthLaunch 11y ago> That's stretching the idea of clickbait quite a bit. He was probably just using that term mistakenly, what a troll.
- aerovistae 11y agoWait, what? Who are you calling a troll?
- shaneofalltrad 11y agoTurns out that website crashed all my tabs in Chrome. Never seen that one before.
- tdicola 11y agoDidn't one of the boards sell for almost $1M recently? Did the market for them drop massively or did some fool over pay by $800k for an Apple I?
- jkestner 11y agohttp://www.computerworld.com/article/2837776/vintage-apple-1-sells-for-a-record-905k.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2837776/vintage-apple-1... $905,000, and presumably there's a premium for being in working condition. I think there's also a small market of people who have the money and care to spend it on this, so prices can fluctuate quite a bit.
- chaostheory 11y agoConsidering the time for the sales transaction taking place (2 days?), I'm sure if they took it to an auction house it would fetch a much higher price. There's only 50 ever made and it's from a household name that even the fashion houses respect. On the other side of the story, this story is totally genius marketing (if intended). I've been hearing this firm's name all day including their policy of sharing proceeds with people who donate.
- jkestner 11y agoYou may be right, but if you look at the history of sales recently, the prices are all over the place. This one's still pretty low in comparison, but if it isn't working, that could explain the difference. Or perhaps some of these came with accessories, like a cassette player. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#Collectors.27_item http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#Collectors.27_item 5/13: $668K 6/13: $390K 11/13: $330K 10/14: $905K 12/14: $365K
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI hope they find her, a $100K isn't anything to sneeze at. I did go to a garage sale in the Bay Area where an older couple there had the manuals for an Altair 8800 which they kept because they thought they might have some historical value to someone but threw out the hardware because it wasn't really useful to anyone. But over the years it is very hard to know what will and what won't become collectible in the future. Back before Jobs turned Apple around you would be lucky to get $500 for an old Apple I, after all who wants the first computer of a failed computer company? :-)
- AHHspiders 11y agoHow cool. Makes me wonder what might be worth more in today's disposable age. Maybe ten years from now, old cellphones that had removable batteries will be in high demand, because a sun flare blew out all the modern ones. shrug
- dmourati 11y agoI read that as Apple "I" (as in me) discarded...
- peter303 11y agoThese boards were $666 in 1976, about $4K in today's money. Plus you had supply a TV, power supply, keyboard, and punch tape reader. That was twice my income in those days.
- dpe82 11y agoGoing by CPI it's actually about $2,800 in today's money. Still a significant amount of cash though. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=666.00&year1=1976&year2=2015 http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=666.00&year1=19...
- kadavy 11y agoI'm not fantastic at math, but I think that makes it about an 11.3% annual rate of return after inflation. That's not outrageous, but I'd take that investment.
- bwldrbst 11y agoAnd that's why I like to eyeball the piles of junk on the side of the road waiting for collection by the council. So far the best I've managed is a Commodore 64!
- bontoJR 11y agoI had some very old machines around, even if I am not even 30 yo, I love almost any kind of old machine I was able to collect. I had a small collection since a couple of years ago composed by Sun Ultra-60, Next Workstation (working, but original HD was gone), Next Cube (never worked), Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Apple Macintosh (not working) and some others machines people were not interested anymore and I was able to collect for free. It was a quite good collection and funny to deal with in the spare time, but then, one day, my father decided to discard all of them because they were old and mostly broken. I was so disappointed it took me a while to realize it.
- ck2 11y agoWow with that kind of payout I am surprised there aren't counterfeit chinese clones by now.