A first-generation iPhone still in its factory-sealed box sold for an eye-popping $63,356.40 at auction Sunday.
The unopened 8-GB iPhone was estimated to go for at least $50,000 but brought in even more cash.
The Apple relic sold for more than 100 times its original price of $599 in 2007 after 27 people placed online bids via LCG auctions. Bidding started at $2,500 and opened on Feb. 2.
At the time, the first-release smartphone featured an innovative touchscreen, a web browser and a 2-megapixel camera. Consumers could choose between the model with 4 GB of storage for $499 or the model with 8 GB of storage for $599 when the phone first went on sale on June 29, 2007.
Steve Jobs had unveiled the new product known as the iPhone months earlier at a San Francisco trade show called MacWorld. It received Time Magazine’s “invention of the year” and quickly became Apple’s best-selling product.
The lucky seller of the $63K iPhone, Karen Green, said she had gotten the phone as a gift from friends for starting a new job in 2007.
Green, however, already had a new phone and didn’t want to switch wireless carriers in order to activate the iPhone, she said.
It sat unopened on her shelf for 12 years until she had it appraised on the daytime TV show “The Doctor & The Diva” in 2019.
“I didn’t want to get rid of my phone, and I figured, ‘It’s an iPhone, so it will never go out of date,’” she said during the show’s “Treasure Hunt” segment.
The show’s resident appraiser valued it at $5,000 at the time.
But in October, Green saw that an unopened, first-release iPhone sold for $39,339 in an earlier auction held by LCG.
She told Insider that after saving the phone for all those years, she decided it was time to sell in order to support her new business endeavor a cosmetic tattoo studio in New Jersey.
“If I could hold off on the phone for like another 10 years, I probably would,” Green told the outlet. “The only reason why I am selling that phone is because I need to support this business.”
The phone was purchased by a private buyer whose name has not been disclosed.