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Probably the most valuable ruined keyboard

Not long before Steve Jobs’ second coming to Apple in 1996 he was giving a talk to The Stanford Graduate School of Business’ High Tech Club at the home of Steve Jurvetson, now a venture capitalist, then a young MBA candidate.

For three hours, Mr. Jobs sat in the lotus position on the floor in front of the living-room fireplace answering questions good-naturedly. Afterwards, the host, Steve Jurvetson, asked the legendary figure to autograph his Apple Extended Keyboard which had already been signed by Apple cofounder Steve Woznyak.

After the fireside chat, seeing Woz’s signature already there, Mr. Jobs was a little surprised and he exclaimed "This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It’s a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No." And with his car keys he pried it right off.

Alan Deutschman, in his book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, reported the moment, culminating in Jobs' comment: "I’m changing the world, one keyboard at a time."

According to Mr. Jurvetson, who later worked for Apple and NeXT, his keyboard was not the only Apple product to physically suffer from Mr. Jobs’s wrath. In reaction to the company’s mismanagement, during his many years away from the company, Mr. Jobs also "stabbed the Apple logo off of his Mac."

"Steve Jobs now rests with the sublime satisfaction of symbolic immortality," Mr. Jurvetson said.

Seeing a NYT article about the story, Wozniak commented:

"You may well have the only Apple device with both our signatures on it."

UPDATE 2020-12-17

This keyboard was sold for $74,535.

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