Unopened first-gen iPhone, still in box and shrink wrap, receives huge winning bid in auction

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.

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.

What I should have done in retrospect was never opened the box containing the first Apple iPhone because an auction house named LCG Auctions (via Insider) recently put up for bidding an unopened 2007 iPhone (with 8GB of storage) still in its original box and covered with the original shrink wrap. The phone collected 27 bids between February 2nd and February 19th and the winning bid amounted to $63,356.40. That figure is over 100 times the phone's original price tag of $599. Bidding started at $2,500 and was expected to top out at $50,000.

Then Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on January 9th, 2007, and it immediately captured the attention of the world well before its release over five months later. Whether you prefer iOS or Android, credit must be given to the iPhone as it became one of those rare products that actually helped change the world. Today, the vast majority of the world relies daily on touchscreen smartphones to help get things done, amass knowledge, and to get entertained.

The original iPhone featured a 3.5-inch LCD display with a resolution of 320 x 480. A single-core processor running at a clock speed of 412MHz was under the hood with either 4GB or 8GB of native storage. The device came with a 2MP rear-facing camera and a 1400mAh battery. Inside the box was a 30-pin cradle to help charge the device.

This particular iPhone was the subject of a segment on a television show called "The Doctor & The Diva." Every week the program held "Treasure Hunt Tuesday" and the owner of the wrapped 2007 iPhone explained how she came to own the phone. Karen Green had just started a new job and her friends bought her a gift, the iPhone. But Green had a contract with Verizon and at the time Apple's smartphone was an AT&T exclusive.

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.