Who knew a relic from the past could make you $63,000 richer 15 years later?
Remember the first-generation iPhone, which was predicted to fetch $50,000 at auction? After all, it did bring in some big cash.
After going up for auction on February 2, the first-generation iPhone sold for $63,356.40, which was more than 100 times its initial price. According to CBS News and USA Today, the originally sealed 2007 phone was sold on LCG Auctions for more than $13,000 more than the $50,000 estimate.
According to sources, the phone sold on Sunday after a total of 27 bids, with the bidding starting at $2,500.
Karen Green, the original owner of the phone, received it from friends after winning a new job in 2007, but she never opened it since she didn’t want to get go of her old phone. Nevertheless, Green already had three Verizon phone lines at the time, and iPhones would only work with AT&T, according to USA Today. To avoid the cost, she “kept the phone on a shelf for years, unopened and unused, wrapped in a pair of felt pyjamas for good measure.”
In 2019, she had it appraised. According to sources, the phone was valued at $5,000 because it was an 8GB model rather than a 4GB one and was still in its original box.
“I didn’t want to get go of my phone, and I figured, ‘It’s an iPhone, so it’ll never go out of date,'” Green stated on “Doctor & The Diva” in 2019.
But, this is not the first time an old iPhone has been auctioned; one sold for $35,414 in August and another for $39,339 in October via LCG.
But it’s hard to blame Green for seizing this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity after recently learning of another original, unopened iPhone selling on eBay for $10,000.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh my Goodness, I think I have the original,'” she told the publication. “I contacted my son and told him to go retrieve the phone and make sure it wasn’t open.”
Thus the moral of the story is to keep your unopened old phones.
