When Steve Jobs announced the release of the iPhone on this day in 2007, revealing Apple would be combining an “iPod, a phone and an internet communicator” into one device, the crowd went wild at MacWorld San Francisco.
Six months later, the iPhone hit retail shelves. Some critics and commentators famously panned it — my personal favorite is Microsoft’s Steve Balmer, who called it “not a very good email machine.”
Customers, however, responded to the product with more than just resounding approval, but a near cult-level obsession and supercharged affinity for the Apple brand and Jobs.
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“Collectible”is far from the first adjective one would think to use in describing the iPhone.
Revolutionary? Yes. Influential? Considering half of you are reading this on one, double yes.
Despite it falling far outside the confines of typical collecting categories such as cards or comic books, the iPhone actually represents a perfect case study into what makes something collectible and why.
Today, there are around 1.4 billion iPhone users in the world, and Apple has sold more than 2 billion since 2007. Ubiquitous is a cliché at this point. Everyone understands exactly how integral the iPhone has become in our daily lives.
And that is the first and most significant reason why it is so collectible. Whether it’s a Shohei Ohtani card, Batman comic book or a prop from the production of a movie, collectors are drawn to items that connect to a key facet of the culture.
Ohtani nearly single-handedly brought baseball back into the mainstream this year. DC has sold around 500 million Batman comic books and generated billions at the box office. “The Wizard of Oz” permeated popular culture so intensely that 85 years after its release, the ruby red slippers from the film sold for $32.5 million.
The iPhone’s cultural relevancy exceeds all of these things in its intensity. But in order to be collectible, something can’t simply be popular, it also requires scarcity.
That might seem like an impossible task considering the mass production of the iPhone, even just when looking at the original 2007 release. But collector preference for unopened or sealed items, much like a wax box of cards or an NES video game, allows for a market to arise surrounding a hyper-limited supply of unopened original iPhones.
With the keys of cultural relevance and rarity checked off, we can look a bit closer as to the specifics that make an unopened original iPhone a totem for the ideal collectible.
Behind the rarity of sealed examples comes a seemingly illogical backstory: Someone went to the Apple Store in 2007, paid around $500 for the most innovative and buzzworthy piece of technology since the personal computer … and never opened it.
That explains why so few remain unopened today, but also acts as a perfect example for how accidents make the best collectibles.
The T206 Honus Wagner is so valuable because of the “accident” of Wagner demanding a halt to printing of the card. The rocket-firing Boba Fett prototype (i.e. the most expensive toy in the world) was never supposed to leave the factory. A dime from 1975 missing the letter “S” is worth $500,000 thanks to that “accident.”
Crucially, the iPhone also has tiers of collectibility. Like a parallel or insert in trading cards, which drive higher values for the shorter printed examples, the original iPhone was released in two versions: 4 GB and 8 GB.
The 4 GB example was discontinued after only about two months due to low sales numbers, making it an order of magnitude rarer (and more valuable) than its 8 GB twin.
All of these little details, taken together, reflect a blueprint of collectibility that can be seen nearly anywhere you look in the collecting world.
This doesn’t mean the iPhone is the “best” or most valuable collectible by any means — in fact, recent sales have sagged quite noticeably — but rather, it allows for a bird’s eye view of collectability, through the lens of an item that one might never consider in the first place.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.