This original sealed iPhone cost $40,000. I regret (almost) nothing
Sponsored by my wallet: https://mkbhd.com/products/matte-black-everything-wallet
Original iPhone vs modern iPhone: https://youtu.be/zIjngBAxTr4
Also fun fact while this was being edited we did in fact get confirmation from Apple that this mysterious "Lucky You" sticker was definitely used by some Apple retail stores back in 2007, sometimes around gift purchases. The cherry on top that confirms it's all real
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Tech I'm using right now: https://www.amazon.com/shop/MKBHD
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All right in the collector world of Classics Usually old pieces of tech aren't really all that interesting. like who wants to buy an iPhone 6 right now? the number one, most sought after piece of tech in The Collector World is the factory sealed unopened original iPhone Now Fun fact: Back when we went to go make that uh, reviewing every single iPhone video, we did have to go back and find and buy a working version of every single iPhone ever made. And the further back you go, the harder it is to find a working version. And we eventually did find a couple like these three original, used but still working iPhones from 2007.

maybe it's because they're 16 years old, they are really beat up, but the fact that they're still working is kind of a miracle. Finding one that is original, still sealed, never been opened, never even been touched by human hands or seen by human eyes is extremely rare. It's so rare that I've actually seen many people get scammed by this. An unopened iPhone is so rare and valuable that people will actually seal a used original iPhone and sell it online as an original and man YouTubers have fallen victim to this.

spending thousands of dollars to try to get their hands on what they thought was going to be an untouched iPhone It's just crazy that people go out scamming like this. but hey, the difference in value between just any old original iPhone and a new sealed untouched iPhone is gigantic and it's well worth the price of the cellophane and the heat gun and the effort required to make an old iPhone seem new. Only about 6 million First Gen iPhones were ever sold and so of course, the number of unopened ones will only ever go down from here. And it's sort of this weird game of trying to figure out when their value has peaked and looking at the numbers, it actually feels like it has peaked.

So one actually sold at an auction in February this year for over sixty thousand dollars, which was a record and the highest we've ever seen. Then another one appeared at an auction in March. A month later, that one went for fifty five thousand dollars. Then there was one with this lucky You sticker even more rare.

They probably thought they were going to get the most money for it, but it actually went up at an auction a few weeks ago in Chicago and somebody scooped it for only forty thousand dollars. I Guess they got a bit of a discount because that person was me and this is the package it came in. Uh, because that auction house was not messing around. It was actually kind of surreal winning this auction.

Just for the record, it's not like a normal auction site like Ebay.com where you just click a button and you win. This is an actual auction. Like a live streamed video of a guy with a gavel going to get 6000 over here. 6500 in the front row.

We got 6 800 on the phone until we hear seven thousand Seven thousand here and it just keeps going and you can participate from anywhere in the world. So they were going through a bunch of stuff and the iPhone was item number 203 and so when they got to 203 I Logged into the site and I had my initial offer placed which was the minimum of 32 000. The contents have been x-rayed, verified going once, going twice, sold to the online bidder. Moving on I just won Like that was the moment when I committed to uh, figuring this whole thing out.
and so the rest of the price was just, uh, sales tax and uh, bidding premium and shipping. Which feels like a really good time to say that this video is sponsored by you. There's a lot of things that we could have spent forty thousand dollars on like camera equipment for example, but we decided to do this and so we've brought back the MKBHD matte black wallet. It was super limited edition before, but they were very popular so we're bringing them back in a slightly less limited edition at shop.mkbhd.com They're also really sick and now I can say that this video is made possible by my wallet.

The link is below please buy one Have I Made a huge mistake. Only one way to find out. but uh, it's time to dig into this gigantic crate. So my biggest question as I Get into this is how do I verify if this is actually brand new and Untouched by human hands like on the auction website.

We did see that there were uh, there were some X-rays and the x-rays are cool and they make it feel really official. But all we really know by seeing those x-rays is that the accessories are in fact in the Box we don't know if they're untouched. Oh and then the other thing about this is when you when you put in a serial number on like Apple's Checker uh you can see that it is not registered. So whoever got this phone originally which I think they said the name of the original owner who brought it in uh never registered it.

It was never used, it was never activated. but that doesn't mean it was never opened. So this this is very much uh, a trust exercise. So many layers.

this is like a Russian doll of OG Tech products. Now this is the one where I need to be careful. I'm a professional guys, it's fine. This is fine.

There it is that is the packaging of this brand new but also not so brand new original. iPhone You can see it's got a little bit of Browning around it I'm not too put off by that and some of the articles that I read online after I bought it were saying basically this break here in the corner and uh, some other factors are possibly why it went a little bit lower than the record sixty thousand dollar price. It also has this upside down lucky You Sticker. Every article that I've read that I've looked up about this Lucky You Sticker Nobody seems to know what it is.

It's kind of confusing because it is super rare. Other original sealed iPhones don't have this sticker I even asked people at Apple they don't know what it means. There are so many things I think people forgot about the original iPhone One is it didn't have an App Store so it was just the apps that were on it and two, you couldn't set a wallpaper with the first version of iOS so everyone's iPhone looked exactly the same. So without any further ado, All right, this is the moment that all the value just went from forty thousand to uh I don't know depends on how good the condition of the phone is.
but the plastic wrap this 16 year old it it does have a smell. oh fancy. So they had foam in the top of the boxes and this is the way it showed up facing you on the top. Wow! I think that is actually brand new.

just a little thing, just a nicely designed little Factory seal thing. Oh this is harder than a this happened in Justine's video. This is a hard screen protector to take off. Okay, so there's a little piece of plastic hard plastic.

actually. Then there is the documents signed designed by Apple in California I Actually don't know if there's a sticker. This is now all new territory for me despite it being old. Oh, there's more.

There's a there's a whole microfiber inside that says iPhone on it. Interesting fingertips. These are all the uh. the tips for using and operating your iPhone in 2007.

How to set a passcode, how to send a message, how to browse the web, and uh oh, the stickers are a little bit. Askew Is that how they were? Can you see those how they're One of them is upside down and tilted. The other one's right side up and tilted so it kind of. It kind of looks on purpose, but also looks different because they're usually aligned.

Now there is even more. This is what I was talking about. This is what was x-rayed by the auction house just to verify that they're here, but they're all also still sealed in the box. So USB A wall brick.

You also have a 30 pin dock with a headphone jack out on the back. This is nice. Let's open those. Let's open the dock that is brand new.

Wow, it would look like that. Uh, you also get two more things. You get a 30 pin USB a to 30 pin charging cable and data cable you plug this into iTunes plug it into your computer and earpods. This was back in the iconic days of well, the silhouette commercials and the white headphones and plugging the wire into your phone.

that feels very legit. I Don't think it's going to turn on but I'm gonna hold the power button anyway. This is one of those things where like it's a 16 year old battery. of course it's not going to turn on.

That would be a pretty red flag actually if it did boot up. If it okay it doesn't, that's good Is this? This all just feels like exactly what they didn't want me to do when I bought this original iphone. Look at the difference between that brand new, fresh piece of metal versus one that somebody was out using in their everyday lives. So while I wait for this a little bit to just probably take a minute to charge.

but I feel like I can say that with all that I know and all the research that I've done going into this purchase, it seems like this one is legitimately brand new and unopened. If anyone can tell me if anyone knows or if anyone who's watching this worked in Apple retail around the time in 2007 when the iPhone was launched. What if this came from Apple or if this is something completely different I would love to know because that would be really interesting. There's one story online about how it might have been like a holiday season sticker.
Who knows. All right, we're back. actually I'm back the next day, hence the different shirt and the haircut, but ignore that. Uh, and I want to go over everything that I learned because we now have gotten the iPhone to turn on and I am convinced that it is an unopened original and I also learned some things about the iPhone 2..

So first of all, I am convinced that it's an unopened original because of this shrink wrap being super old because of the shrink wrap that was around the iPhone that was inside the Box being perfect looking and even the fact that it's actually surprisingly difficult to get a 1.0 iPhone to get past this uh iTunes boot screen. If you actually download an old version of iTunes and plug it in and try to activate it, you can get surprisingly far and still not actually get it to activate that all sort of lens Credence to the fact that we could get other iPhones to activate because they had later versions of software. Long story short, this is as far as we got with it and it does turn on and work. The weird thing that we found was number one.

This is the original brick and the original cable that came with the iPhone. We plugged them in overnight. We came back in the morning and it still didn't turn on, but when we replaced the brick and not the cable, it actually started to charge. Second thing to learn is there was no SIM card ejector tool with the iPhone at all.

But when you do grab a SIM card injector tool and pop open the SIM card tray at the top, you will find that there is a gigantic SIM card included with the iPhone So this was a at T slash singular exclusive. when it came out and look at the size of this SIM card. this is the uh, the original size SIM card back in the day before micro and Nano SIM cards but then yeah, I Did not remember that it shipped with this dock until I Did my research and I also didn't know it would ship with a black microfiber and these Apple stickers that are slightly Askew and this brand new pristine iPhone is now worth dramatically less than what I paid for it and that's okay, so that'll be it hopefully. I Don't regret this.

Thank you so much for watching and again, if anyone knows what the lucky you sticker means, definitely hit us up in the comments or on Twitter Talk to you guys in the next one. Peace, Foreign.

By MKBHD

12 thoughts on “I spent $40,000 to unbox a sealed original iphone!”
  1. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars OMAR617 says:

    Dannnggg $40k ,$10k wouldโ€™ve change my lifeโ€ฆ.๐Ÿ˜ฎ

  2. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars leo says:

    how much does 4.1m view,10K comments and 220k thumbs worth? leave commons below, thanks!

  3. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars mycollegeshirt says:

    yknow buying my original I knew it would be collecter even when I purchased it. but still. stupid stupid me.

  4. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Brandon Cook says:

    Damn. I worked at Apple back in late 2007. I have two sealed original iPhone one 4gb and the other 8. Never knew they were going for so much.

  5. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Saint Michael says:

    I didn't realize that "top men" were in charge of guarding the original iPhone.

  6. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Lรฉo Ribeiro says:

    Deus abenรงoe a Amรฉrica ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ

  7. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Jadxn says:

    40k jeez..

  8. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Danae Gabriel says:

    You were the guy who bought the iPhone unsealed for 40 grand on the news?

  9. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars The Unambiguous says:

    Iโ€™ll give you $40 for the phone

  10. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Auto Focus says:

    MKBHDont stop wasting money

  11. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Yannick Van Dyck says:

    I was one of the first people in Europe to get the iPhone. My sister was in New York when it was released and waited in line for me to get it. The first few weeks I couldnโ€™t use it for calling or texting, not even after jailbreaking it, because the network in my country didnโ€™t support it. So at first I could only use the non-cellular apps on the phone, and even then everyone was so jealous ๐Ÿ˜‚ I still have it, unfortunately it doesnโ€™t work anymore. There were no cases for it back then, and 1 drop to the floor killed it ๐Ÿซค

  12. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars B Smith says:

    Wth???? Sorry. Just not worth that.

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