One of two Apple Macintosh prototypes extant and already the most valuable Apple Macintosh to have ever sold at auction, #M0001 is heading for auction at Bonhams’ History of Science & Technology Sale on 23 October 2024.
#M0001 is the first prototype of the Macintosh Personal Computer, and its most distinguishing visual feature is the use of a 5.25-inch ‘Twiggy’ disk drive instead of the 3.5-inch drive that was introduced with the Macintosh in 1984.
The Macintosh #M0001 is seeking to become the third landmark Apple computer to set an auction record this year, with an Apple-1 fetching US$945,000 and an Apple Lisa 1 selling for $882,000 (44 times its low estimate) at Christie’s sale of the Paul G. Allen Collection.
Bonhams last sold this extremely rare Macintosh Prototype for $150,075 in 2019, setting a world auction record for a Macintosh computer that has yet to be broken. A 128K Macintosh Motherboard signed by Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin sold for $132,049 in 2021, and a Macintosh SE computer used by Steve Jobs when he was at Next Inc. sold for $126,375 in 2022, but no other Apple Macs have ever broken the $100,000 barrier.
Legend has it that Steve Jobs ordered the destruction of these pre-production machines incorporating the 5.25 Apple proprietary Twiggy drive when he realized that the drives were error prone.
This specimen was saved from the crusher by the developers of the original MacWrite word processing program and was exhibited at the Mac@30 Anniversary Celebration held on January 25, 2014, where it was booted up and operated by Steve Wozniak as well as several members of the original Macintosh team.
Source: Bonhams
