Just received a package via Hong Kong Post

Looks really good ...  But only one? :-)

That looks beautiful!! My build is on an all-gold board which isn't as nice.

In post #4, jmmh wrote:

"That looks beautiful!! My build is on an all-gold board which isn't as nice."

Uncle Bernie comments:

Don't whine about these "golden boards" ! You made a choice for one of them and (hopefully) paid a much lower price than for the Newton boards.

When the "Open Source" Gerbers came out of Russia (thanks, Misha !) you essentially had two choices to use them:

A board made by JLCPCB with everything being tin plated, including the 44 pin edge connector, which basically renders this edge connector unusable, as tin is a very lousy material for sliding contacts.

or

A board made by JLCPCB with their ENIG process option, where everything is plated with a thin layer of gold. You can specify if you want few atom layers or fewer. This ain't the industry standard recipe for nickel / gold plated edge connectors, which is a manual process, and much more expensive. ENIG was originally meant as a corrosion protection to keep SMD PCBs solderable in storage. Despite there are only few atom layers of gold, ENIG makes OK gold fingers for sliding contacts.

Just to give you a number, the tin PCB from JLCPCB costs about $25, and the ENIG one $28 each, if you choose the least amount of gold. You milage may vary depending on the number of PCBs made and the shipping costs chosen.

There have been greedy sellers on Ebay who sold these ENIG boards pretending that they have "real" gold fingers. Well it depends what "real" means. I think calling ENIG "real gold fingers" is a fraud.

There were no other options for a while. When Mike "Newton" restarted the Newton PCBs you could again get real gold fingers with the full industrial spec. But at a price. "retroplace" also has PCBs with real gold fingers which are based on the improved Gerbers made by Logan Greer from the Russian ones (Logan massaged them a little for more authentic looks compared to the originals).

As far as I am concerned I have build several Apple-1 using the ENIG PCBs and under artificial light conditions it's hard to tell them from the tin plated ones. For people on a budget they are still the best choice, I think. And thanks to the gold plating they won't corrode as quickly as the tin plated ones (or the originals).

(Let go any hope that corrosion will turn your clone into something you could sell as an original).

Comments invited !

- Uncle Bernie

In post #11, softwarejanitor wrote:

"I have no idea who the sellers in Florida or Munich or the others on eBay are."

Uncle Bernie comments:

Have no fear. The seller for this board:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/295113975410

is Armin Hierstetter who gained fame for producing these fine reproductions of  the Apple-1 manuals (real print from computer typesetting !) and he then proceeded to adopt my "100 wave-soldered Apple-1" project which I could not bring to fruition mself due to the pandemic disrupting all my elaborate plans ... so I decided to sell off my IC stock I had bought for this project as my - now famous - 100% tested and burned-in IC kits.

These PCBs are from the same lot he uses for the much more expensive "wave soldered" Apple-1 he sells. So they work !

I can't vouch for any other sellers of Apple-1 PCBs seen on Ebay - except for Newton Mike, newton-computer, see here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/255683262154

The lesser known sellers of Apple-1 PCBs on Ebay come and go. It seems that most are hobbyists who have taken the Open-Source Gerbers to order a small production run from JLCPCB and then they sell the excess which they don't need. Sure, JLCPCB will gladly make you just one prototype, if you order that, but this is not economical. So people are inclined to order more to get the price per PCB down, which makes sense. All these PCBs should work, being based on the same Gerbers, but some rookies get the recipe they order wrong, and then silkscreen over copper disappears ... this can be seen in the power supply section, the diode symbols sit on metal, with no solder mask there. The next issue is packing ... shipping these large PCBs is a major undertaking and it's tedious and expensive to pack them well.

As far as I can tell it seems that most of the fraudster's / hucksters who sold cheap JLCPCB based Apple-1 PCBs on Ebay at about the same prices like Newton Mike's or Armin's more elaborate and valuable PCBs have disappeared since these higher quality and better offers became available again. Still, as always: "Buyer beware !".

- Uncle Bernie