TL;DR
- A sealed original iPhone just sold at auction for over $63,000.
- The owner received it as a gift in 2007 and never opened it.
- It is the most anyone has ever spent at auction for an iPhone.
In 2007, you could spend as little as $499 for the first iPhone, which came in 4GB and 8GB models. At a recent auction, however, the phone went for a whole lot more than that.
LCG Auctions just sold an original iPhone for $63,356.40. The phone was untouched over the past 15 years, sealed in its original shrinkwrap. The owner apparently received it as a gift but didn’t use it because, at the time, they didn’t have AT&T service. For the first few years of the iPhone’s existence, you could only use it on the AT&T network.
The owner then put the phone in storage and forgot about it. The “Treasure Hunt” segment of a talk show called The Doctor & The Diva discusses the full story.
This is the most an auction has ever seen for an iPhone. This 8GB model would have cost $599 in 2007, so the auction winner paid roughly 106x that price, or 10,600% more.
The original iPhone is widely understood to have ushered in the smartphone era. Although other phones had most of the star features of the iPhone even before 2007 (including the famous LG Prada), no phone captured the public’s attention quite like the first Apple smartphone. As such, this auction winner likely sees this as an investment in a mint slice of history.
