The $10,000 $20,000,000 $79,000,000 $41,000 iPhone

Still three days left on the auction. Bid early, bid often. Bid like a Viking.

What? You're not interested in a $10,000 $40,000+ iPhone? Pussies. This is a unique piece of techno-net-compu-trashbin-history! I'm willing to sell the contents of my garage for the low, low price of $10,000 $50,000 to anyone who appreciates the real historical value of this iPhone.

The same guy selling it will tell you how to unlock the internet connection on yours here.

[UPDATE2]
The fun police showed up last night and the bid is way down to just under $40,900 now. Looks like eBay just did some cleaning up of the fakers overnight and didn't cancel it outright. That's good. We might yet be able to see another run at $1,000,000,000 before the bidding ends.

It is a legitimate item, not like he was selling the Brooklyn bridge, and their commission on a high priced item is pretty substantial, so I'm guessing eBay is going to be watching this one closely as they want the commission.

I would bet his hack is some sort of violation of Apple's terms of use though when the fine print is read. Most are slipping in prohibitions on reverse engineering and disassembly even though they're often hard to enforce in court. If anyone out there has an iPhone and kept the licensing paperwork could you take a look at the fine print and post in the comments?

[UPDATE1]
I've been "live blogging" the bid price on this iPhone for a while now and we've seen the price go from $10K up to $100M. I'm pretty sure $1B is within reach by midnight now.

Since this is Ace's "very first" live blogging of an auction, I'm pretty sure this blog post is worth some serious jack as an "AoS original". I would like to start the bidding for ownership of this particular blog post at a paltry $100M a bag of Cheetos. A bargain at twice the price!

Well, the iPhone is now $99,999,999.00 -- which is pretty close to $100M, so midnight was a pretty pessimistic outlook.

[FLASH UPDATE]
An exclusive pic of the most current $100M iPhone bidder has been obtained by confidential sources

[END UPDATE]

Dan is also blogging this historic event and has a link to some AP story about the hacked iPhone (which I haven't read)

Its been my observation that this whole techno-history thing runs in cycles. A wave of suckers enthusiasts comes along and drives prices up, then enthusiasm wanes for several years. A slightly smaller group of enthusiasts comes along and the first group unloads all their garbage treasures on the next group and prices spike up a little bit again.

But lets face it - something like an iPhone, of which there are millions of copies available is probably not going to ever be in the same collectability class as say an original Lisa that's still running, or an old Heathkit H8 in cherry condition...even a unique one-off iPhone.

An old 5-slot, 64K motherboard original IBM PC with dual floppies and the earliest "catches on fire" power supply and broken BIOS might someday be worth something. Only a few thousand were made, most repaired in the field with Boca mandated EC's. If there were even 4 or 5 truly originals left that hadn't burned down by now it would be a real miracle, yet its still would only be worth a hundred bucks or so to a hardcore collector. 100 years from now that story might change of course.

I got all sorts of "one off" electronic junk. Most of it is going to be heading to the curb one of these days. The computer junk doesn't have the character that say an old Atwater/Kent radio or Edison record player does.

posted by Purp at 05:28 PM

| Access Comments