Tuesday, February 21, 2023 4:02 pmTuesday, February 21, 2023No Comments

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Karen Green kept her first-generation, eight-gigabyte Apple iPhone, which she got in 2007, sealed in the box, realizing as the years went on that a collector might come to find it valuable. She was right.

The unopened first-generation iPhone sold for $63,356.40 at an auction this weekend
(photo: Sean Gasser/LCG Auctions)

Rachel Treisman for NPR:

When Karen Green got a new job in 2007, some of her friends pitched in to buy her a brand-new iPhone.

And while hundreds of thousands of Americans clamored to get their hands on the first version of the revolutionary (as Apple correctly predicted) smartphone, Green wasn’t one of them — in part because she had upgraded her new (non-smart) phone not long before and reportedly didn’t want to switch from Verizon to AT&T.

“I didn’t want to get rid of my new [not-smart] phone, and I figured it’s an iPhone, so it’ll never go out of date,” Green told the daytime television program The Doctor & The Diva in 2019 (the same month that Apple unveiled the iPhone 11).

Apple’s revolutionary iPhone (2007)

Green kept the first-generation, eight-gigabyte phone sealed in the box, realizing as the years went on that a collector might come to find it valuable… But the results of an online auction shattered all expectations this weekend, when Green’s iPhone sold for $63,356.40 — over 100 times more than its original cost, and more than any vintage iPhone before it.

LCG Auctions founder Mark Montero told NPR over email that because original iPhones were expensive ($599 for an 8 GB model) and their future impact not yet known, virtually all were opened and used as intended.

“To discover an original first release model from 2007 still brand new with its factory seal intact is truly remarkable,” he wrote…

It’s hard to overstate the historical significance of the original iPhone, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced in January 2007.

MacDailyNews Take: We only regret opening our original iPhones a little bit. Back in 2007, we remarked we should have bought extras and squirreled them away unopened, but alas. We still do have our original iPhones, at least, (out of their boxes and with some normal wear, of course).

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[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]