An online auction of Steve Jobs memorabilia just went live, and it’s the weirdest collection of stuff we’ve ever seen.
It includes usually worthless items like old ribbon cables and clip-on bow ties that have been elevated to collector status because they came from Steve Jobs’ childhood home — which was also the legendary birthplace of Apple (the garage, anyway).
The auction provides a unique glimpse into Jobs’ early life, and is also a test of whether almost anything he owned has collector value.
The artifacts — if you can call them that — all come for Jobs’ stepbrother, John Chovanec.
What? You didn’t know Jobs had a stepbrother? Neither did I!
Chovanec became related to the Apple co-founder after Jobs’ mother died in the late 1990s.
Jobs’ father eventually remarried, and his new wife already had a grown-up son (Chovanec), who instantly became related to the Silicon Valley legend.
When Jobs’ father passed, Chovanec inherited most of the items in the Jobs’ family home, which included a lot of stuff from Steve Jobs’ boyhood bedroom, plus the garage where Apple was launched.
Now these items are all up for auction, and boy, it’s an odd collection of stuff, from vintage Apple marketing materials to the graffiti-covered desk where a young Steve Jobs perhaps dreamed of conquering the tech world. Details and pictures here.
Also in today’s newsletter:
Apple just tested its new security apparatus that automatically updates your gadgets in the background. If you don’t want Cupertino messing with your devices without your express permission, here’s how to turn it off.
At CES, Dell debuted a monster 6K monitor that everyone in Las Vegas seems to be lusting after. See the X posts below.
Logitech failed to update a security certificate, and that took out its mice and keyboards worldwide — well, for Mac users anyway. Here’s the fix.
There’s an innovative new iPhone game controller at CES that I’m sorta vaguely interested in because the touchscreen controls of my favorite iPhone game, Scrambler, are wretched.
Perhaps the biggest news of the day is that a fan-made iMac G3 Lego set just took an important step closer to becoming an official product.
— Leander Kahney, EIC.
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We needed some money for tooling the [Apple II] case and things like that. We needed a few hundred thousand dollars. And this was way beyond our means, so I went looking for some venture capital. And I ran across one venture capitalist named Don Valentine who came over to the garage. And he later said I looked like a renegade from the human race.
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