6 rare products of Apple, worth $1.5 million

Some devices are deliberately produced in extremely limited series, and other inevitably became rare, because of the change of marketing policy and other reasons. In this article I will describe the 6 rare computers, iPods and accessories which worth in total around $1.5 million.

iPod U2 Special Edition — $80

Red wheel of the control panel and glossy black body – this version of the player received a catchy look. Its “godparents” were musicians from the band U2, whose stylized signature in the form of engraving can be found on the rear panel of the gadget. This special version of the iPod arrived in 2004 and the price tag was rather big – $349 for a model with a storage capacity of 20 GB only. But it was worth to spend money on it.

Everyone who purchased the iPod U2 Special Edition received a discount coupon of $50 on the discography collection of the group called “The Complete”, which was positioned as the first digital discography recordings of the creative team. Discography included more than 400 tracks, including the song “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb”, which in itself was worth $150 in iTunes.

Two years later, Apple released the second generation of iPod U2 with increased memory capacity up to 30 GB. The price tag has dropped to $329 and users could choose between the discount coupon and universal code to access for 30 minutes any musical content of U2 authorship in the online-store. Unfortunately, to the music lovers, the line didn’t continue, and today players from this line can be found only in private collections or flea markets like eBay with price tag of only $80.

Apple IIGS Woz edition — $450

It is a monument to the epoch of personal computers, the latest model in the Apple II series. “G” stands for “Graphics” and “S” is the “Sound” – the device is the first product of the company, which got color interface, synthesizer sounds and the new LSI chip, designed by Steve Wozniak directly. The computer came with a processor 65C816 2.8 MHz, carried on board an impressive 256 Kb of RAM and 128 Kb of storage.

The owner of this computer to this day has the right to contact Apple for a copy of the certificate of personal uniqueness, certified with signatures of 12 leading engineers of that era. However, the real cost of these computers nowadays is small and rarity can be purchased for around $1.500.

Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh — $3 000

“Spartacus” was the first project attempted by young Jonathan Ive, in the production of the computer and it went under the prosaic name of TAM (Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh). It was an indication of the 20-year anniversary of Apple entering to the computer business – the model was released in the 1997. Cupertino categorically wanted to surprise once again, to impress the audience to goose bumps on the skin, so they tool the risk. In addition to the radical design of the computer it has a different and frightening price tag, $7500, plus a limited sales sector, which included only 5 countries. A year later, even reducing the price to $2000 the project was closed, by that time developed only 12 thousand units.

Today TAM in working condition will cost you about $300. However, you will not be able to install recent software, OS options are limited to the Mac OS 7.6.1 version. But the computer may well play the role of exotic office decoration.

Mac Pro RED — $977 000

To help the global fight against AIDS Apple decided to sale on auction products with unique design. The lion’s share of that brought a RED collection of Apple products – the only one of its kind artifacts of the intersection of technology and art. For example, the Mac Pro computer, designed in the radical barrel red body, which was the child of Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson.

Cylindrical Mac Pro, without additional efforts draws attention – a non-standard architecture of the system unit, an innovate cooling system, due video cards and 12-core Intel Xeon processor. The most powerful computer in the range of Apple products and, as a result of Sotheby auction, the most expensive personal workstation in the world. Red digital monster, went was sold for $977,000 – the greatest sale in history.

Earpods in pink gold body – $ 461 000

The main difference between this product and serial accessories, which are prices at $29 for a pair – the outer shell material. Designers simply put the hardware of the earpods, released in 2012 into the body of 18-carat pink gold. However, together with the membership of the RED series it has provided the desired result. Instead of the expected 20-25 thousand dollars for a pair of headphones Apple managed to earn $461,000.

It happened in 2013 and although since then Apple has released a lot of products in pink and gold colors, nobody created a second copy of such earpods, so they are unique.

ColorWare iMac Retro — $5 600

Result of symbiosis of advanced technologies and new century artistic taste straight from the 80’s – manually assembled iMac mono block. ColorWare Company specially produced small, in this case 25 units, series of retro versions of popular products – PCs, game consoles, etc. The price of only one computer is $5600, which is significantly more expensive than original prices of Apple products, but it has several reasons for that.

Firstly, different hardware, which is much better than top-end configuration of the latest models of iMac. In particular there is Intel Core i7 4GHz processor, 32 GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, AMD Radeon R9 M395X graphic card with its own 4 GB of RAM. Secondly, the kit includes a wireless keyboard and mouse, which are externally and functionally indistinguishable from the original. Thirdly, the current neutral gray logo was replaced with rainbow logo from the time when Steve Jobs was young and prosperous businessman. And, of course, limited edition makes this computer in its way unique.