A working Apple-1, Steve Wozniak's signature along the top edge of the motherboard, and a letter from Steve Jobs asking for the computer back. That bundle closed at Bonhams on October 14, 2026, for 1.15 million dollars with the buyer's premium, which Bonhams calls a world auction record for a commercially sold Apple-1.
The machine is No. 48 on the Apple-1 Registry and carries the name of its first owner, Fred Hatfield. He wrote to Apple complaining that there was barely any software for it. Jobs answered in 1978 with a trade-in offer: send back the Apple-1, add 400 dollars, and get a motherboard for the newly released Apple II.
Hatfield kept the computer. He later sold it privately for 40,000 dollars while it still needed repairs, and the buyer restored it, got Wozniak's signature on the board, and set an auction record of its own with it in 2013, as MacRumors recounts.
For me, the letter is what makes this lot. Fewer than 75 verified Apple-1 computers survive, Bonhams says, and most come with a registry number and little else. This one comes with a trade-in pitch signed by Jobs himself, decades before trade-in credit became a routine line in Apple's checkout, and turned down by the customer.
Two bidders spent 28 minutes on it against a pre-sale estimate of 500,000 to 800,000 dollars. It still isn't the priciest Apple-1 item on record: the "Celebration" prototype board sold for 2.75 million dollars in January, which is why the record is scoped to commercial units. The buyer hasn't been named.
