People have strange ideas of worth

[pecunium]

What would you pay for a first generation iPhone?

Because I saw someone offering one (still in the packaging), for $500, another $100 will get it unlocked.

Seems to me (what with the oddities I recall of unlocked iPhones becoming bricked), that's a pretty high price (new, they were $499, and that got rebated. Right now the 3g is (so it seems to me) $160 up front.

Is there some hugely collectible nature to them? Some hidden value for the phone in the box? Because I am just not seeing how it can be worth $600.

Comments

[urox.livejournal.com]

New in the box means less likely that it was stolen and then trying to be resold. There's a *lot* of iphones being stolen out there from people.

There may be also some things about actually getting an iphone. Previously, I don't think you could get an iphone without a contract. Due to recent California rulings, as far as I know, you don't have to worry about the contract. But other states might still have the contract which the seller may be trying to recoup.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Nope, that's just someone trying to get money out of the rubes.

[maps-or-guitars.livejournal.com]

Seconded. There's always someone trying this with tech stuff.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

One notes that it's being offered at that price, not that it's been sold. As the late Howard De Vore sometimes said, of his bookselling business, "It's easy to pencil a big number on the flyleaf of a used book. Selling the book for that much isn't so easy, and I'd rather have a smaller amount of actual cash in my pocket than hundreds of supposedly-valuable books on my shelves". On another hand, the internet offers a marvelous opportunity to locate the (possibly only in the world) person who might pay a ridiculously large amount for something.

[bunnybutt.livejournal.com]

I can speculate as to why someone might think they'd *get* $500 for a first gen:

1) new in box, it may become a collector's item;
2) the new 3G's ability to be unlocked is questionable;
3) there have been a LOT of problems with connectivity with the 3G iphone, including dropped calls an inability to sustain a connection with the 3G network (resulting in a lot of time on the EDGE network). While Apple has recently released a software update that corrects some of these problems, there is speculation that it is a hardware problem; and
4) availability of the 3G has been pretty limited, especially in northern california.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

"New in box" is certainly the way to sell to collectors.

But are there any?

[raaven.livejournal.com]

There are collectors of Apple anything.

[davidkevin.livejournal.com]

It strikes me that the others are right, that this is someone looking for the Mark of Marks.

Conversely, it could be the Fool of Sellers, who thinks he has something inordinately valueable, much like the comic book speculators of the early '90s who bought three or more copies of every different cover version of every one of the dozen or whatever different X-Men comics Marvel was publishing at the time thinking that the resale prices would rise but which didn't.

...presaging the Housing Bubble in small scale by fifteen years or so. "Financier" (read "Red-handed thief") Ron Perelman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Perelman#Marvel) ran Marvel like a sub-prime mortgagor, so no surprise that it was bankrupted by him.

[cactusthesaint.livejournal.com]

I sold mine unlocked for ~$330 a few weeks after the 3g came out. The extra $100 to get it unlocked just means the buyer isn't capable of unlocking it themselves.

I've heard reports that the prices have been going up a bit, maybe just over $400 used, but haven't checked myself. Log into eBay, do a search for completed iphone auctions to find out.