Collecting is a thorny subject. Whatever it is, being a collector of something implies spending astronomical sums to get the object we are missing. If we talk about technology or video games, easily we can leave several thousand euros in products that, in their day, were not so expensive.
“Retro” is popular and many users buy items to enjoy with them, have a little piece of history (in my case I use a first-generation Pixel and my partner Ricardo has returned to his Nexus 5) or simply put it on the shelf . However, not all retro has the same value, since the article must meet a series of conditions, such as The first generation iPhone that has been sold for 60,000 euros.
Who has an original iPhone sealed for 16 years?
Last year, the iPhone turned 15 years old. Launched in 2007 (and with a presentation in which there were many prototypes that Steve Jobs alternated because the system simply did not work), the iPhone changed the market.
That first model was only sold in the United States, so the rest of the world had to wait for the following year to have the second generation: the iPhone 3G. As you will understand, the first iPhone is a coveted item for many collectors, but it isOnly some of them have a value that we thought was incalculable. Until very recently.
And it is that, in February of this year, LCG Auctions auctioned off a first-generation iPhone for (brace yourself) $63,356.40. A month later another model sold for $54,904 and you’re probably rubbing your hands if you have an iPhone 1 at home, but wait a minute.
And it is that, the two models that were sold for that exorbitant amount were in perfect condition. Well, so much that they were factory sealed. Now, how do you keep a 16-year-old phone sealed? The answer is most curious.
The auction house performs an x-ray to verify that everything is in place. Before, many things came in the box of a mobile, right?
At least, in the case of the more than 60,000 dollars, the terminal belonged to a person who had received it as a gift. Being an iPhone linked to an operator other than the one that said person had contracted, it was kept in a drawer for all that time. That person was Karen Green, as Business Insider revealed. So, you see, it’s not that simple.
It is wonderful to open a 2007 mobile in 2023 to see what we have lost along the way
Apart from those two iPhones, a slightly different third was sold, one with a red badge on the box. Apart from the Apple symbol, you can read ‘lucky you’ (something like “how lucky”). Those labels on an iPhone indicate (as we read on Apple Insider) that it was a gift edition in a gift box.
YouTuber Marques Brownlee was the one who bought this iPhone for $40,000 and in its unboxing it allows us to see everything that the package included, as well as all the protection with which an auction house sends the product:
In addition to the phone and manuals, the charger came with the famous 30-pin connector, headphones and a charging dock. The phone came with an AT&T card (the company that got the exclusive contract with Apple to distribute the first iPhone) and something curious is that a tool to extract the SIM did not come in the package.
We have lost the charger, headphones and dock in the new iPhones (and in the vast majority of the premium range), buttime comes the skewer of the SIM in the box. something we have won.
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