When Karen Green got a management position at an American pet supermarket chain in 2007, her friends bought her a valuable gift. It was a novelty from Apple at the time, the first generation iPhone. However, Green did not even open the phone. It was “subscribed” to Verizon, while competitor AT&T had exclusivity on the iPhone. According to the portal Business Insider she didn’t want to risk hefty termination fees and losing her number.
She therefore put the box with the iPhone on the shelf, where it lay unnoticed for the next few years. She said she thought about selling it a few times during them. She became more interested in the former gift after hearing that similar pieces were sold for thousands of dollars. For example, in August 2012, an unopened original iPhone was sold on the eBay auction portal, for which the interested party paid 10,000 dollars, i.e. roughly 200,000 crowns at the then exchange rate.
Out of curiosity about the price of her first-generation iPhone with 8GB of memory, which cost $599 at the time of its launch, she appeared on the US TV show Doctor & the Diva in September 2019. At the time, the audience valued Green’s phone, in the more collectible first package with a depiction of 12 application icons on the display, at five thousand dollars (approximately CZK 117.5 thousand according to the exchange rate at the time).
Green decided to sell her iPhone, which had been stored for years, only at the end of last year, when she was starting her own beauty salon. She wanted to financially support her business in this way. She therefore approached the auction house LCG Auctions, which was intrigued by her phone with the story. She ranked it that way to its bid with a starting price of $2,500, i.e. roughly 55 thousand crowns in conversion. The auction took place from February 2 to 19 and was estimated to fetch at least 50 thousand dollars (more than 1.1 million crowns). In the end, however, she significantly surpassed him.
The winning bid was more than ten thousand dollars higher, for Green’s phone the winner of the auction will pay $63,356.40, i.e. more than 1.4 million crowns. That’s more than 105 times its original sale price.
It is not the first time that LCG Auctions has offered similar equipment. The original sealed iPhone of the first generation with 8GB of memory appeared in its offer at the end of last September. Already on the day the auction started, the starting price of $2,500 (according to the exchange rate at the time, approximately CZK 62,500) rose to more than three times, on the last day of its duration, i.e. October 16 last year, an offer came in the form of a final $39,339 , i.e. converted according to the exchange rate at the time, roughly 984 thousand crowns. It was this auction that was the main impetus for Green to sell her still unopened packaging with the original iPhone.
The world saw the first generation of the iPhone on January 9, 2007, when this brand new device was presented in San Francisco by the then head of Apple, Steve Jobs. Those interested, however, had to wait a few more months, because this novelty did not arrive on the sales counters until the end of June, and that was only limited to some markets. There were two variants on offer with different user memory capacity: the 4GB version cost $499 (about 10.6 thousand crowns at the exchange rate of the time), and an additional $100 (roughly CZK 2,100) was charged for double the memory.
Remember the very first iPhone ad:
