Glenn Dellimore, who placed the winning $815,000 bid for the rare “Celebration” Apple-1 computer last week, told Business Insider he and his wife Shannon were prepared to pay up to $2 million for the important piece of history from Apple’s early years.
The Dellimores — who founded the Hollywood skin care brand Glamglow, now owned by Estée Lauder — think that in around 10 to 15 years, the Apple-1 sold by CharityBuzz “could be worth as much as a Monet or Picasso.” The rarity of this particular Apple-1 is doubled by the fact that it started as a “blank original-run board,” that was never meant to be sold to the public and was not from a production run, potentially making it one of the first Apple-1 computers ever made.
“When the auction was taking place, I realized we’d actually be in the air when it ended. Just as our wheels touched down, there were 30 seconds left in the auction and I was actually outbidded with 37 seconds left,” Dellimore told Business Insider. “I think the bid was $270,000 when I looked, and then it went up again, and I kept going bidding with someone else until it was $515,000. I said, ‘you know what, I’m just going to put in a large number.'”
Dellimore said he might have bid up to $2 million if he had been outbid again. “Typically with things that are so valuable and so rare, there will be buyers in the world that are willing to pay whatever it takes,” he said.
The couple plan to display the Apple-1 in a museum, where they hope the early home computer can be used to help educate youngsters about the history of computers.
“The possibility of it being the number one, the very first prototype that Steve worked on, and with the way over time Apple has changed the world, this computer is the holy grail of computers, it is the most important computer on the planet, I think,” Dellimore said.
