I Spent $40,000 to Unbox a Sealed Original iPhone!

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 um 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 cuz 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 uh 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 reeal 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 $60,000 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 $555,000 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 $40,000 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 do we get 6,000 over here 6,500 in the front row we got 6,800 on the phone do we hear 7,000 7,000 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 $40,000 on like camera equipment for example but we decided to do this and so we've brought back the MKBHD mat 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 docomo 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 [Music] 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 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 on online

after I bought it we 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 $660,000 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 this is the moment that all the value just went from 40,000 to uh I don't know depends on how good the condition of the phone is but the plastic wrap the 16-year-old it it does have a smell ooh 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 it's 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's 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 es skew is that how they were can you see those how there 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 it also looks different cuz 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 usba a wall brick you also have a 30 pin dock with a headphone jack out on the back this is nice let's open the let's open the [Music] dock that is brand new wow it would look like that uh you also get two more things you get a 30 pin usba to 30 pin uh charging cable and data cable you plug this into

iTunes plug it into your computer and ear pods this was back in the iconic days of well the sil commercials and the white headphones and plugging a wire into your phone that feels very legit I don't think it's going to turn on but I'm going to 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 this is 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 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 learn some things about the iPhone 2 so first of all I am convinced that it's an unopen 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 it you can get

surprisingly far and still not actually get it to activate that all sort of lends 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 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 ejector 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 Singular exclusive one 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 doc 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 a skew 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 [Music] [Music] [Applause]