Maybe you didn't have time to read Walter Isaacson's 656-page biography of Steve Jobs -- a little long, ironically, for reading on the iPhone and iPad. No worries, Apple fanboys and girls: There's plenty more to come. The Jobs biopic starring Ashton Kutcher -- celebrity tech booster and super tweeter -- is finally in the offing, slated for Aug. 16.
For those of you who didn't get the sneak peek at Sundance in January, Open Road Films just released the first trailer earlier this week (see above). It's clearly a vintage tech geek's fantasy in live-action: wood-mounted motherboards and flashing green cursors, bulky transistors and tube-based monitors.
That model you see Kutcher and actor Josh Gad (playing master engineer, Steve Wozniak) hooking up about 20 seconds into the trailer? It's the first Apple computer, the " Apple I" -- a motherboard pegged to a wooden plank drawn from Wozniak's designs, hand-assembled by Jobs and Wozniak in 1976. Only 200 of them were created at the time, and Christie's is currently auctioning one of the first 25, labeled "01-0025" and signed "Woz." It's the star of Christie's "First Bytes" online-only auction, a sale of early Apple prototypes, software and other Apple ephemera, running now through July 9.
A close-up the motherboard at 1:23 is of the same model you see at Christie's, here. It's one of the only models of its kind that still works.
The film, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, chronicles the rise, fall, resurrection and near apotheosis of Jobs during his roughly 30 year career, going back to his earliest days as a college dropout in the late 1970s, bumming barefoot around northern California. You may have heard that's when he and Wozniak launched a little startup in his apartment and his parents' garage. It was called the Apple Computer Co.
The rest, as they say, is history; to say that Apple changed the world is no hyperbole. Perhaps that's why bids on the Christie's Apple I were already up to $300,000 at the time this was written.
For more info about the sale, to browse the rest of the collection, and to see what's next, go to http://www.christies.com/onlineonly