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

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.

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Trevor Mogg
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