The Most Expensive iPhone Ever Sold
Written by
J. Arky
Edited by
Zuri Anderson
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According to Forbes, a first-generation iPhone sold at auction in 2023 for a whopping $190,373. That’s nearly 380 times the price of what the smart phone cost when it was released in 2007, which was $499.
The 4GB iPhone was a rarer model and harder to find due to it being discontinued two months after debuting. The 4 GB iPhone is 20 times rarer than the 8 GB model, which cost $599, came with more memory, and was released at the exact same time.
GOBankingRates delved more into the eye-popping sale of this historic smartphone.
The Auction Sale
The record-breaking iPhone sold by LCG Auctions is not the only bit of vintage tech that has scored a high price.
In fact, it was the third original iPhone to fetch a high price on the auction block in less than a year’s time with an 8 GB model selling for just over $63,356 in February 2023 and another 8GB model going for nearly $39,340 in October 2022. Every single one of these devices came in their original packaging, making them more valuable as they were found to be in mint condition.
While these iPhones are jaw dropping when it comes to their final sales numbers at auction, they are not the only technology to cause a stir and drive up prices for old school gear heads.
Original iPods
The original iPod is extremely hard to come by today and sought out by collectors who are constantly on the hunt for this game-changing piece of technology. That’s because it was the MP3 player that changed how the world listened to music forever, allowing users to download songs from their computer and keep all of them stored in their pocket.Â
Some original iPods that are still in their packaging and can work today have gone for as much as $90,000 at auction, while those out of the box are able to get tens of thousands of dollars from eager collectors.
Working Apple-1s
Before there were iPods, iPhones or even Macbooks, there was the first ever computer from Apple known as the Apple-1. Built in 1976 by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in Steve Jobs’s garage, it was one of the first 50 machines the company released in its early days and cost $666.66 when it debuted.
Bonham predicted that the Apple-1 would sell in the range of $300,000 to $500,000, but the $905,000 price tag turned it into the most expensive Apple-1 ever sold at auction when it went home with a buyer in 2014.
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