The United States Mint’s new $1 American Innovation Coin featuring Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs is now available for purchase from the U.S. Mint website.
“I’m pleased to celebrate the release of the California American Innovation $1 Coin,” said Mint Director Paul Hollis. “Steve Jobs was a remarkable innovator and transformed how the world connects and communicates. Through this coin, the Mint honors his incredible work and recognizes his importance to both California and the United States.”
The Steve Jobs Coin portrays a young Steve Jobs, dressed in his usual turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers, sitting in front of a northern California landscape of oak-covered rolling hills, caught in a moment of meditation. The coins inscription includes the words “make something wonderful.”
The full description of the coin from the U.S. Mint website:
This design presents a young Steve Jobs sitting in front of a quintessentially northern California landscape of oak-covered rolling hills. His posture and expression, as he is captured in a moment of reflection, show how this environment inspired his vision to transform complex technology into something as intuitive and organic as nature itself. Inscriptions are “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “CALIFORNIA.” Additional inscriptions are “STEVE JOBS” and “MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL.”
As noted by The Steve Jobs Archive, the “MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL” inscription refers to a larger Jobs quote from an internal Apple employee-communications meeting held on October 23, 2007:
There’s lots of ways to be as a person, and some people express their deep appreciation in different ways, but one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.
The collectible coins can be purchased in a roll of 25 for $61, or $2.44 each, while a bag of 100 coins can be purchased for $154.50, making the cost per coin approximately $1.55. Buyers can select coins minted in either Denver or Philadelphia. A total 25,950 Steve Jobs dollar coins have been manufactured, and orders for the 100-coin bags are limited to 10 per household, while the rolls of 25 are limited to 10 rolls per household.
Previous coins honored other states and their innovations, including Pennsylvania for the Polio vaccine, New Jersey for the lightbulb, Ohio for the Underground Railroad, and Texas for the International Space Station. So far, 33 states have had coin designs released or revealed.
Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple and the company’s first computer offering was the Apple-I in kit form which was sold for $666.66. The best-selling Apple II followed, as did the Lisa (which was an expensive flop), the Macintosh (which continues to sell well to this day), and other innovative devices, including the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. All of those devices were industry-changing innovations.
