This Steve Jobs handwritten Apple-1 ad just sold for a whopping $175,000

Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs is still fondly remembered even more than a decade after his death from pancreatic cancer. So it perhaps shouldn't be all that surprising that a handwritten ad for an Apple-1, penned by the man himself, should sell for a big sum of money when put up for auction. But did anyone expect it to fetch quite this much?

Apparently not, because the lot that just sold for almost $176,000 was originally expected to sell for a fraction of that when RR Auction put it up for grabs. But the action ended with one buyer spending $175,759 on the handwritten ad copy as well as Polaroid photos that were taken at a local store - The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California to be exact. Jobs even added his own comment to one of the photos, saying that it was fuzzy because the camera "wiggled" when the image was being taken.

The auction was originally expected to bring in around $30,000 so it's fair to say that it exceeded expectations. It also comes with a letter from the items' former owner that explains where they came from which no doubt helped bump the price up a bit.

The story goes that the owner was a friend of Steve Jobs from the 1970s and that they were given the ad copy and photos in 1976 during a visit. The person stayed in touch with Jobs through the next few decades and was able to see him in 2011, just months before he died in October of that year.

This auction is far from the only one related to Apple and Jobs that has popped up of late. And given the huge amounts of money changing hands it's unlikely that we won't see more in the coming months and years, too. It would appear that anything related to Jobs is worth money to someone. As one example, two NeXT business cards with Jobs' name on them recently sold for almost $5,000. It's also worth noting that they weren't signed or anything - they were just business cards that have somehow survived all these years.

Other notable auctions include a Steve Jobs Pixar business card that sold for almost $3,250 and a prototype Apple mouse from 1984 that recently sold for more than $17,250. You can see those auctions and many more on the RR Auction website at the link below. Just make sure to hide the credit card before you go looking.