Apple-1 successor prototype discovered

APRIL 1, 2026 — LEOMINSTER, MA — Fifty years ago today, Apple Computer Company was founded to sell their debut product, the Apple-1 computer. After swift sales at The Byte Shop, co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs developed the Apple II, which became the company's cash cow for the next decade.

The year leading up to the Apple II's release was a flurry of innovation, experimentation, and dead ends. Now, fifty years later, one of those lost prototypes has been unearthed from a landfill in Alamagordo, New Mexico, and will be featured in the next issue of Juiced.GS.

"This previously unknown artifact reveals a lost timeline of what could've been, had Apple not abandoned the Apple-1 line in favor of the Apple II," mused editor-in-chief Ken Gagne.

This Apple-1 revision, codenamed "Samuel Clemens", sports notable enhancements over the original Apple-1. A hardware teardown shows the CPU has been boosted to 1.023 MHz, representing a calculable 2.3% increase over the previous year's tech. The Clemens also has a whopping 16K memory, double what the original Apple-1 had. Building on the single expansion slot on the Apple-1, the Clemens has user-upgradeable RAM, courtesy a reserved spot on the motherboard where additional memory can be soldered.

Most notably, the cassette interface, which was previously an optional add-on, is now included, with inbuilt tape decks right on the motherboard. And unlike the Apple II and Mac, which offered no clear upgrade path for legacy customers, the Clemens is backward compatible not just with Apple-1 software, but with the original Blue Box, allowing users to call the Vatican for free.

The software support doesn't end there: the original Apple-1 was infamously built because Woz wanted a game machine in his home — and, true to its heritage, the Clemens comes with multiple games on cassette, including Lunar Lander Requiem; Hamurabi II: Dead Reckoning; Super Mega Colossal Cave; and Breakout Annihilation.

More than just a games machine, the Clemens would've also made inroads into office productivity and education, much as the Apple II later did. VisiCalc Zero would've tabulated spreadsheets of up to 3x3 cells (9x9 with additional memory) with occasional accuracy, while Trail would let players shop for bullets and oxen in the town of Independence, Missouri. (Those purchases could then be used in expansion cassettes [sold separately].)

Unlike the Apple-1, which came without an enclosure, the Clemens is carefully ensconced in what Apple would've dubbed an "Air case". The Apple-1 Air case cushions the motherboard in a transparent envelope of nitrogen and oxygen, eliminating any obstacles that would prevent the powerful hardware from being observed in action.

A complementary line of colorful nylon cases would've allowed users to invest in customizing their rigs further. Sketches of these cases reveal an Apple-1 Pocket designed by Issey Miyake, suggesting the Clemens was a testbed for portability that was later incorporated into the Apple IIc.

Alas, almost none of this ultimately came to be, thanks to the upstart Apple II supplanting its predecessor. "So many Apple II diehards swore off the Mac for killing their favorite computer," reflected Gagne. "Now we know this was a pattern, and that the Apple II was just as guilty for terminating its ancestor, too."

"I told you I wasn't the bad guy," said John Sculley when asked for comment.

To address this historical oversight, Juiced.GS is pivoting to focus wholly on the Apple-1 line. The inaugural issue of Juiced.One debuts this summer, and news, reviews, interviews, and how-tos about the vast quantities of new software and hardware being developed for the Apple-1 are expected to fill the usual twenty pages per issue.

In a completely unrelated move, Juiced.One is also shifting its publication schedule from quarterly to decennially. Subscribers are invited to renew at an introductory price of $25 for five issues over the next fifty years, locking them in at a rate that will not be adjusted for five decades of inflation.

"Stay tuned for more details about our new favorite retrocomputer," closed Gagne. "Apple-1 Forever!"