Crazy that Apple sold this.

There was a cafeteria as recently as 2018

I feel sad every time I think about Fry's and the death of big box electronics retail. I still long for those trips where I'd simply spend hours looking for what's new. Amazon can't deliver the same high and neither can Microcenter, the not-so-bad modern version.

Don't get me even started about Radio Shack :'(

I loved all the themed locations in Southern California, although the north-Orange county one, where the theme was just “aerospace” and all they really did was put a giant Space Shuttle model in the center (Burbank’s 50s sci-fi movie theme was, I think, the best of the lot).

Would love a coffee table book of Fry's. The themes alone would make good viewing!

The one in Austin (piano themed) met a sad end.

Part of their old space is now being redeveloped for a MicroCenter.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you click on one that says '$ [date]' instead of '$ no auction' then it will say. E.g. August 2022 for $677k: https://www.apple1registry.com/en/2.html

The Apple 1 registry site says that it was likely a marketing stunt by the e-waste facility (https://www.apple1registry.com/en/theapple1.html):

> The story of an almost-destroyed Apple-1 found in a recycling center is a bit strange. There’s no proof it's true. No picture of the Apple-1 has been published, yet the company was in the news for a long time. After gaining so much attention, many people sent old computers to them. Numerous requests for a photo or info went unanswered. No Apple-1 expert or collector was ever contacted by the recycling company.

As far as I can tell, there's no public record of the sale, the buyer never came forward, and all the photos of the computer from news articles and stuff are stock images of other Apple 1s.

Or just reproducing it and selling it on the basis that it works exactly the same way as the original...

I'm slightly mystified at the sums collectors items sell for. It seems intuitive to me that their prices should be some function of their inherent values, however that's calculated. It could even be many times that number but it should at least be tethered to reality.

I previously asked about how hard it would be to create a forgery and got a nice answer here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29173562#29175946

TLDR: it would be very hard, perhaps next to impossible to create one, and then you'd still have the issue how to convince people it's real, given that the existing ones are pretty well documented and accounted for.

>For that amount of money it’s incredible we aren’t seeing fakes…

I suspect we are.