Someone will read this story and immediately go searching for that old iPhone they’ve been holding on to for a few years “in case it’s worth something one day.” This day may have come for you.
A 2007 first-generation iPhone just sold at auction on Sunday for an incredible $63,356. That exceeded the $50,000 experts thought it would fetch.
Twenty-seven bids were placed on the phone between February 2 and the final sale on Sunday. The first bid came in at $2,500.
Now, this original iPhone was sealed in its original packaging and had never been opened, according to LCG Auctions.
Back in 2019, Karen Green, the original owner of the phone had it appraised and experts believed it was worth about $5,000. That estimate was largely due to it being in its original packaging and being an 8GB model.
Green said her friends bought her the phone but she never bothered to open it since she had already gotten a new phone.
“I didn’t want to get rid of my new phone, and I figured, ‘It’s an iPhone, so it will never go out of date,” she said in 2019.
This high price for an original iPhone is nothing new. Back in August another first-generation iPhone went for about $35,000 at auction and another for over $39,000 in October, according to LCG Auctions.
Here’s the crazy part — when the first-generation 8GB iPhone came out in 2007, it cost $599. (And many of us thought that was a crazy amount of money for a phone at the time.)
The latest version of the product that Apple released in 2022 is the iPhone 14 and it costs between $799 and $1,199.