$1 → $1M · 5 tiers

Computer.

Six decades of computing in five frames — from a hand-soldered breadboard to a one-of-one room-sized supercomputer.

The duct-taped breadboard

Material: Salvaged motherboard from an old DVD player, breadboard, mismatched RAM, no case — held together with electrical tape and stubbornness.
Function: Boots Linux on a good day. Plays Tetris. Crashes on Tuesdays.
History: Built by a teenager in 2004 from parts found in a recycling bin. Made with scrap but with soul — the kind of machine that taught a generation that hardware isn't magic.
What bumps the price: Add a case (+$10), add a working fan (+$5), upgrade the screen from a CRT (+$25). Each upgrade kills a little bit of its charm.

Material: Refurbished 2018 ThinkPad: matte plastic shell, decent keyboard, a battery that holds 70% of its rating, 8 GB RAM.
Function: Browser, document editing, light coding. Will not run modern games.
History: ThinkPads earned their reputation on Mars. NASA used Lenovo laptops on the ISS — same product line. The $100 used unit you can buy on eBay is an ex-corporate machine that has already survived four years of conference rooms.
What bumps the price: SSD upgrade (+$30), backlit keyboard (+$20), a US-layout swap to fix the European ENTER key everyone hates (+$15).

Material: Aluminium unibody, M-series Apple silicon or Ryzen 7, OLED panel, 16 GB unified memory, NVMe SSD, MagSafe-style charging.
Function: Edits 4K video without sweating, runs Docker containers in the background, lasts a full international flight on battery.
History: The first MacBook Pro shipped in 2006. The product category — laptop you can actually do work on — is younger than most of the YouTubers who use it.
What bumps the price: Memory upgrade past 32 GB (+$200/tier), AppleCare or business warranty (+$200), trackpad gestures unlock with paid software (+$0 — trick of the trade).

Material: Custom case milled from a single block of aluminium, two server-grade Xeon CPUs, 256 GB ECC RAM, twin RTX 5090 cards, water-cooling loop with custom RGB.
Function: Renders Hollywood-tier 8K animation, runs simultaneous local LLMs, mines crypto if you ask nicely.
History: Pixar's earliest render farm filled an entire room and cost less than this single workstation does in 2026. Moore's Law happened — and now the room fits on a desk.
What bumps the price: Liquid nitrogen overclock kit (+$2,000), display calibration with a Spyder X (+$300), an ergonomic chair you actually deserve at this price (+$1,500).

Material: A 50-qubit quantum core in a cryostat at 15 millikelvin, paired with a classical Xeon-Phi cluster, all sealed inside a temperature-controlled clean-room rack made of brushed copper and gold-plated waveguides.
Function: Runs Shor's algorithm on small numbers, simulates molecular folding, breaks weak encryption in seconds, refuses to run Word.
History: Built by a private buyer in 2025 to factor 18-digit numbers as a party trick. Only twelve units like it exist worldwide; ten are in research labs and two are in private vaults.
What bumps the price: On-site cryogenics technician on retainer (+$200K/year), provenance papers signed by the engineering team (+$50K), a custom Yacht-style chassis with the buyer's monogram (+$80K).