These Apple sneakers are rare, pricey, and very 1990s

By Trevor Mogg July 24, 2023

Rare Apple sneakers from the 1990s. — Sotheby's

If you’re all-in on the Apple brand and walk the streets with an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods, then how about completing the look with a fetching pair of custom-made Apple-branded sneakers?

Auction house Sotheby’s recently listed a pair of the retro shoes for $50,000.

According to the item’s listing, the sneakers were specially made by Omega Sports for Apple employees and were part of a one-time giveaway at a National Sales Conference in the mid-1990s.

“Having never reached the general public, this particular pair of sneakers is one of the most obscure in existence and highly coveted on the resale market,” Sotheby’s said.

The shoes feature a predominately white upper along with the rainbow Apple logo that the tech giant dropped in 1999. The logo also appears on the tongue of each shoe.

The rare item is boxed as new and comes with an alternative set of red laces. However, the shoes have been marked by the passing of time, with imperfections including yellowing around the midsoles and light marks on the toe boxes.

Oh, and in the unlikely event that the buyer (if there is one) wants to actually wear them, they’ll have to have size 10.5 feet.

A pair of the same sneakers (size 9.5) went up for auction in 2020, fetching $9,687 after 20 bids. That’s also a fair chunk of money, but way less than the winning bid for an original, boxed, 4GB iPhone that fetched an eye-watering $190,372 at a recent auction.

But that’s a mere snip compared to the astonishing $905,000 winning bid in a 2022 auction for a working Apple-1 computer built in the 1970s, one of only 200 ever made and believed to be one of only 50 units built by Steve Wozniak in Steve Jobs’ garage.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Computing

How Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to take on Apple

An Intel Meteor Lake system-on-a-chip.

It seems like Apple might need to watch out, because Intel and Microsoft are coming for it after the latter two companies reportedly forged a close partnership during the development of Intel Lunar Lake chips. Lunar Lake refers to Intel's upcoming generation of mobile processors that are aimed specifically at the thin and light segment. While the specs are said to be fairly modest, some signs hint that Lunar Lake may have enough of an advantage to pose a threat to some of the best processors.

Today's round of Intel Lunar Lake leaks comes from Igor's Lab. The system-on-a-chip (SoC), pictured above, is Intel's low-power solution made for thin laptops that's said to be coming out later this year. Curiously, the chips weren't manufactured on Intel's own process, but on TSMC's N3B node. This is an interesting development because Intel typically sticks to its own fabs, and it even plans to sell its manufacturing services to rivals like AMD. This time, however, Intel opted for the N3B node for its compute tile.

Computing

How much does an AI supercomputer cost? Try $100 billion

A Microsoft datacenter.

It looks like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sora, among other projects, are about to get a lot more juice. According to a new report shared by The Information, Microsoft and OpenAI are working on a new data center project, one part of which will be a massive AI supercomputer dubbed "Stargate." Microsoft is said to be footing the bill, and the cost is astronomical as the name of the supercomputer suggests -- the whole project might cost over $100 billion.

Spending over $100 billion on anything is mind-blowing, but when put into perspective, the price truly shows just how big a venture this might be: The Information claims that the new Microsoft and OpenAI joint project might cost a whopping 100 times more than some of the largest data centers currently in operation.

Computing

There’s an unexpected, new competitor in PC gaming

Snapdragon's X Elite PC SoC.

Windows gaming on ARM is becoming a legitimate possibility, and it's not just thanks to the recently unveiled emulation options, but it's chiefly due to the fact that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is shaping up to be pretty excellent. Spotted in a recent benchmark, the CPU was seen beating some of the best processors on the current market. Are we finally at a point where it's not always going to be a choice between just Intel and AMD?

The benchmarks were posted by user @techinmul on Twitter, and the results couldn't be more promising for the upcoming Qualcomm processor. The chip was tested in Geekbench 6, and although it's important not to take these results entirely at face value, it's an impressive show of performance that bodes well for upcoming thin and light laptops.