Unopened iphone
On Thursday, an unopened, first-generation iPhone from 2007 is projected to fetch more than $50,000 at auction.
A first-generation iPhone was given to cosmetic tattoo artist Karen Green in 2007. Karen Green received the phone as a gift from her friends when she started a new job. It has a 2 megapixel camera and 8GB of storage. Green had a new phone, though, and the iPhone was incompatible with her current cellular network so she never used it. Green placed the iPhone on a shelf instead of opening it. It stayed there for years, “wrapped in a pair of felt pajamas.”
The iPhone was first unveiled by Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at MacWorld San Francisco, and has since become one of the most significant and widely used innovations of our time. It was made available for purchase on June 29th for $499/$599 less than five months later. The original iPhone featured a 2-megapixel camera, a 2-megapixel touch screen, 4/8 GB of storage, and a web browser. The recognizable packaging showed a life-size depiction of the iPhone with 12 icons on the display. It swiftly turned into Apple’s most popular device, revolutionized the Smartphone market, and won the 2007 Time Magazine Invention of the Year award.
More than 15 years later, Green’s iPhone — still in its original packaging In 2019, Green appeared on “Doctor & the Diva,” a daytime television program, for a section where a select group of fans may have objects assessed. The estimated worth of Green’s iPhone was $5,000. Green kept the phone for a while longer. She heard of a significant auction in October where a factory-new, first-generation iPhone sold for almost $40,000. She had just opened a New Jersey-based cosmetic tattoo Parlor named Tattician at the time. The only reason for selling that phone because she need the money to keep her business running.
LCG Auctions, Green reached out the auctions. According to Mark Montero, the founder of LCG Auctions, “99% of them didn’t have the same thing.” But Karen had a truly original piece with an interesting back story. Based on the sale price in the October auction and the extensive media publicity, the phone is expected to bring in $50,000 or more when bidding begins at $2,500.
When appraisers on the program put a $5,000 value on it, her suspicion was proven correct. But, the outcome of an online auction this weekend defied all predictions when Green’s iPhone sold for $63,356.40, which is more than a hundred times what it originally cost and more than any other historical iPhone before it.
