Something has to be the most sought-after thing in every collectors' hobby. The Apple I is not historically significant enough alone to justify the prices they get, there is a cultural/memorabilia component too. Just rare enough to form an elite "market". It's an indicator that computer age collecting is healthy and robust. The Apple I prices help support all vintage computer prices, if you're into all that.
I have noticed, from running an indie computer museum for 4 years, that young people dont know much about 8-bit computers. They're much more interested in SGIs and NeXT and DOS gamers with a mouse GUI. Fast forward 50 years. Impossible to know how society will rememeber the computer age, roughly 1950-2000. A lot of kids today dont lust after a computer like prior 4 generations, their smartphone and school-issued chromebooks are just fine. Most people today own computers that are nothing more than a network interfaces. We in this group are atypical, archaic by definition. No one collects cloud servers, the things that do the real work and storage. Will they? Not sure what you call it but we're not in the "computer age" anymore. My point, the memorabilia factor that supports Apple I prices will drop off, leaving only the historic value. Will the historic value support current prices? A market requires demand. What will be the demand in 2073? Historians will always value the Apple I and a few others from the computer age, but the price escalation phase of probably over. One would still have to pay the future value equivalent of $250,000+ for an Apple I for as long time. Few if any other computers from our era will earn anything close to those prices. Bill On Fri, Aug 4, 2023, 2:03 PM Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 04, 2023 at 08:51:31AM -0500, John Herron via cctalk wrote: > [...] > > That price is interesting. Does that imply the value has gone down after > > some skyrocketed close to 1 million? One still has to make the decision > of > > a owning a house or an apple 1. > > Well, both of them are treated as speculative investments, putting them out > of reach of people who just want the pleasure of using them rather than > looking for the next bagholder. The main difference is that I can just buy > the parts to build my own Apple 1 and nobody's going to stop me, whereas if > I try that with a house the local authority gets quite upset. > >
