This writer made a god-awful trade many, many, many years ago when I traded my nearly complete 1968 Topps baseball card set (including the now valuable Nolan Ryan rookie card) for a Strat-O-Matic baseball game. For those unaware, Strat-O-Matic is by far the best tabletop baseball simulation game ever created. It seemed like a good deal at the time. And yours truly missed another big dollar opportunity when I purchased the first iPhone model not too long after it was released back in 2007.
Original Apple iPhone from 2007 still in the box and shrink wrap is auctioned off
Not happy with EDGE (which you might call 2.5G), the lack of MMS support, and the inability to use the phone while running the browser, I put my iPhone up for auction on eBay and got my money back. I turned around and bought the LG Voyager which did have 3G connectivity. After that, I purchased the buggiest phone ever to come out of a box, the BlackBerry Storm. That was followed by the Motorola DROID which was arguably the first handset that could compete with the iPhone.
Original iPhone in box and shrink wrap receives a winning bid of over $63,000
Why was this 2007 iPhone never used or even taken out of the box?
If you watch the embedded clip from the show, you’ll see how misinformation starts since one of the hosts says that the first-gen iPhone units originally didn’t come with a camera and that they were added later. And to double down on a mistake, the owner of the phone said that her model had the camera because she had the 8GB variant. For the record, all 2007 iPhone units came equipped with the rear-facing 2MP camera.
Green was asked why she never opened the box and replied that “I didn’t want to get rid of my new phone and I figured it was an iPhone so it will never go out of date.” Now we could note that Karen didn’t know exactly what the iPhone could do when she received it as a gift all those years ago. But we would also point out that she is the one laughing all the way to the bank after the device produced a winning bid at auction in excess of $63,000.
