The iPhone 14 Pro may be the phone everyone wants, but an iPhone from 2007 is expected to fetch 50 times as much at an auction this weekend.
Cosmetic tattoo artist Karen Green is selling an original 8GB iPhone from 2007 that was given to her by friends as a gift for starting a new job. Since she had just gotten a brand-new phone at the time, she never opened the box, and now she is auctioning it off to the highest bidder. The phone was featured on an episode of Doctor & The Diva’s Treasure Hunt Tuesday section.
That bid is expected to top $50,000, a tidy return on an original $599 investment. However, while the phone will surely work, it won’t be of much use as an actual phone, since it was exclusive to AT&T’s 2G EDGE network, which has since been shuttered.
The original iPhone launched in 2007 in two varieties: 4GB for $499 and 8GB for $599. It had a 3.5-inch display with a Samsung processor and had just 16 apps. But it introduced several new technologies that would last for decades, including pinch to zoom, pull to refresh, autocorrect, and inertial scrolling.
Of course, the winning bidder will probably just admire the sealed box for a few years until it’s auctioned again for an even higher price. If you’d like to participate in the bidding, you have until February 19.
Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.