A fool and their money
You know the rest............
OK, going by previous auctions of retro Apple hardware, it's clear that there are fanbois out there benefiting from an infinite money glitch or something – but this is getting ridiculous. On Sunday, an original 4GB iPhone was sold by Louisiana-based LCG Auctions for $190,372.80 – almost 382 times the RRP of $499 when it was …
buys Apple?
Yeah because it's terrible to buy a phone that isn't headed to landfill 3 years after you bought it..
(Yes, Apple and their products have flaws but at least, with some notable exceptions, they do try to keep the stuff going as long as possible. *That's* why they cost more)
So the deliberate slowdown of older models, the lock-in for replacement parts and the iPhone 4's stupid "you're holding it wrong" didn't happen then? Not saying you're wrong about the landfill problem but please let's have some perspective here as Apple have actively encouraged some of their products to the wheelybin. No vendor loves you, trust me on this, unless you're a shareholder.
"the deliberate slowdown of older models" is grossly misrepresenting the issue.
Like every other phone, iPhones don't go into burst mode when the battery has decayed. Because there isn't enough power; this is a physical constraint, completely disjoint from the age of the phone. It depends entirely on when you last got the battery replaced.
Apple got sued — rightly — because customers then came into Apple shops and said to Apple employees "my phone has slowed down, what can I do?" and instead of saying "pay £89 for a new battery (or sneak off to get it done for a much more reasonable price elsewhere)", Apple employees said "pay £799 for a new phone, only available from us".
So Apple employees failed to recommend a cheap solution that's also available from third parties, instead indicating that the only option was expensive and available from Apple only.
Noted before the inevitable responses: declining to accept some absurd misrepresentation of the very negative thing a company did does not make one a bought fool.
...as long as the Great Fool machinery continues to operate"
And there's the risk with collecting or even just storing, anything as a potential future investment. The object may or may not ever become collectable or historic and even if it does, it might only be for the duration of a particular generation or two who have the nostalgia. And choosing exactly what to keep/store is purely a lottery anyway. Even the cheapest bit of tat might well be a valuable collectors item in 40-50 years because no one sane would ever want to keep that cheap bit of tat, so you get rarity IF there's a market.
The battery is almost certainly going to be screwed anyway since Li batteries really really don't like being fully discharged and left that way for years. I don't know what the rule were back then, or if any rules applied in the US, but generally these days, Li batteries or items containing them are only supposed to be shipped with a limited charge state to minimise the chances of battery fires but even if fully charged, I'd expect it to have drained to zero over the last 16 or so years.
Probably not, because if it's been discharged this long, there isn't much potential energy left to make that happen. Charging a battery adds plenty of potential energy which can make a bloated battery into a small fire, but if it hasn't become damaged to the point of ignition now, it's likely not to without a new source of energy. If it's plugged in, no guarantees of anything. Given the loss in value that cracking it open would bring, it's probably not worth it to collectors.
Until you realise we live in a world where people have been spending similar sums on "owning" crappy jpeg pictures of cartoon monkeys because it says so on a blockchain.
In reality it's no more valuable than an unopened 1970s box of cornflakes, and has as much use i.e. none. It's just a shame that the people who sustain this sort of market can''t think of a more useful way to put their money to work.
In reality it's no more valuable than an unopened 1970s box of cornflakes
My wife still has a Timothy White's [1] branded box of cotton-wool balls that her gran bought in the late 1960's (price on it is in shillings and pence)
And I have an almost mint iPhone 3G sat in a drawer somewhere. With an almost-mint iPhone 4, and almost-mint OnePlus 2 etc etc etc. And an almost-mint Nokia Communicator and Apple Newton.
Someday I'll go through all my device tat (and the 50 or so paper ream boxes of paperback sci-fi novels - mostly in very good condition as I don't dogear or break the spines) and find an appropriate tat bazzaar to sell it on.
I don't agree with your definition of scarcity. It could be manufactured again, but two factors apply. First, if it did, it would be the 2023 run of the devices, not the original run, which collectors care a lot about. Second, it's not going to be made again. Let's say that I wasn't a collector and actually wanted a device like this because I have something that requires one. There's no chance that Apple, hearing my situation, would go make some more for me. I would have to find one that already exists and try to get it to work, and there aren't many available for me. They are scarce because I can't make one when I want one and the existing supply is low. That doesn't make them valuable; a lot of scarce things are unwanted, and this thing has no useful purpose other than a collection item, but it is still scarce.
The same applies to a bunch of old bits of technology. Not that they're all of interest to collectors, but if you have a computer from 1992 attached to some expensive equipment, not that rare a situation, and part of it breaks, you may find yourself wanting a replacement part. Those things could be manufactured again. Sure, not all the components on the boards are still made, but those too could be re-manufactured if you can get access to the designs, and probably quite cheaply because the cutting edge manufacturing methods of 1992 are now the basic available to everyone methods. In fact, you might find that some of them are cheaper to redo on cheap modern manufacturing methods because the ones in use are so old that they're no longer used today. Yet, doing that will prove so difficult in practice that nobody will do it. Instead, you'll have to scavenge for original, 1990s-made versions of those parts in order to get that machine running again, and they'll be scarce indeed.
You can make a machine like a C64 or a Spectrum out of all-modern hardware, you need to order different parts from different suppliers but it's possible. FPGA systems like the MiSTer will reproduce an ST or an Amiga about as accurately as can be done. On original or modern hardware, these computers still work.
An iPhone will never work, the online services it connects to just don't work any more and 2G is decommissioned in many countries and will soon be decommissioned in the rest. If you could somehow fix either of these problems then it wouldn't be an iPhone either.
Whereas you can actually use older hardware and derive some value from it that way, you can't use newer hardware as it has to connect to online services which manufacturers have no interest in maintaining using protocols which are out of date. An second-hand iPhone has no real value now, it's just tulip mania.
I suspect it would cost more than $190k to recommission the fab plants that created such an iPhone and reactivate the supply chains, so arguably this is a bargain from that perspective. And to be clear, it still wouldn't be an original iPhone.
Most rare items could easily be manufactured again. Star Wars toys, original Apple 1s, stamps, coins, a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO Berlinetta. It wouldn't make the collections out there any more or less valuable.
-- It wouldn't make the collections out there any more or less valuable. --
I wonder when the word value came to mean whatever you can get a mug to pay for it? Value is always context sensitive. The value of the first-gen iPhone if stuck in the middle of a desert looking for your next glass of water would be approximately zero. What worries me is the context we're living in to apply such distorted value to what are essentially worthless objects.
That became one use of "value" as soon as money became generally accepted, meaning that you could sell something to someone and use that money to buy the things you needed. If that disappears, such as your desert scenario, then it has lost a lot of value. The word's been consistently used in multiple forms, meaning either a specific amount of value to you, but not necessarily anyone else, and a more general level of value, often a shortened form of "market value". It's how the economy has worked for centuries.
.."Hey, it's your money son!". Actually I'm 52 and he still says it but now I'm older and wiser I get the more subtle version, "I'm not telling you what to spend your money on.".
I guess what people spend their money on is their business but something about this just sums up how empty and vacuous our whole society is these days. Worshipping at the feet of mobile phone technology and here in this case, something akin to the "Arc of the Covenant" in mobile phone cricles. What a sad little species we are.
Exactly! You know you are getting old when you visit a museum and see exhibits you remember you or your family owning when young[er] :-)
The latest exhibit at Beamish Open Air Museum is the "1950's town" containing many exhibits that were very much still around into the 60's and later which I clearly remember (Well, from late 60's anyway, what with only being born at the start of the 60's!)
Thanks, you've reminded us we really need to visit again as we've not yet seen the 1950s town (well, SWMBO visited before the whole 1950s town was in place, as our local history group worked with Beamish on some of the background materials).
Although not sure about chips in a cone: round our way (admittedly down on the south coast) in the 60s & 70s "do you want it open?" meant you just didn't get the outer layer of newspaper, it was still a sort of squishy rectangle you held in one hand or, less painfully (hot'n'fresh), you put on the park bench seat or plonked down on the shingle beach (none of your namby pamby sand here). Guess I'll just have to force myself to give them a try (purely for research and the historic experience, you understand).
"Although not sure about chips in a cone:"
Yes, back in the day that was common. A triangular shaped grease-proof "bag" that was sort of a cone when filled with chips and the shop staff knew how to fold the paper/newspaper to "wrap" it so little hands could easily hold the package to eat from the top, often leaving a small "drink" of about half inch to an inch of vinegar in the bottom. I've not seen that for many many years other than some seaside places that have specially made cardboard cone vaguely reminiscent of the old days, often printed on the outside to look a little like newspaper.
The "Year 2000" used to seem *so* futuristic!
And reasonably well-paying as a techie contractor.
Afterwards? Not so much - hordes of barely-trained contractors who thought that the experience they got applying manufacturer patches and re-running the y2k test suites (created by people like me) made them into fully-rounded contractors.
Contract rates went from £40/ph to about £15/ph - at which point going permie on a good wage [1] was financially far more advantageous than staying as EKS.
[1] Blagged my way into a Solaris/NIS/Network sysadmin job despite *technically* never having done any of them before.
You mean the one that had the display fixed so it only ever showed maximum signal, only worked without crashing if you follow a preordained sequence of actions and didn’t deviate from that? That phone?
And before all the downvotes from Apple fans that’s actually true. Please read the relevant pages in Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution to gain further insight from people involved. AT&T also installed mobile base stations around Moscone to provide guaranteed signal.
I don't think anyone would doubt that. It was a sales pitch and demo, and remember it was beaming live to the large screens behind him, before iPhones were capable of doing that (from memory anyway). We've seen what happens when you trust "live" kit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeUyxjLhAxU
only worked without crashing if you follow a preordained sequence of actions and didn’t deviate from that?
Sounds like my technique in my programming class - we had to write (in Pascal) a stock management system. The variant of Pascal I was using (on a BBC Model B) didn't do in-place updating - if you wanted to update a record you had to copy the data up to the record you wanted to update, read the record, update it in RAM then write it to disc, followed by the rest of the file.
My first cut *sort* of worked by, after a few goes, would corrupt the data file.
So I recoded it as in semi-interactive demo that prompted the user to press certain keys which would trigger a set of graphics, then propmt for the next key-press.
The lecturer was reasonably impressed -- even though I hadn't *actually* fulfilled the brief (and I'd reasoned why toolset selection was important in my response) I'd been sufficiently inventive that he was prepared to pass my submission (in fact, gave me an 80% score).
That was one of the few classes I enjoyed in my HND (failed) - the rest (comms theory and technology) was bearable because the lecturer was really good. Analogue and digital electorics however I loathed with every fibre of my being - we had 2 lectureres - one near to retirement that would just come in, mumble at us for an hour, throw some paperwork on the front bench and then walk out. The other was newly-qualified, only a few years older than us and more interested in trying to bed the few girls in the class.
Um. I think you needed to read the manual. The BBC Micro OS (even 0.90) was perfectly capable of doing updates to the middle of files on DFS, NFS and all later filesystems, and if it was Acornsoft Pascal (that came in two ROMs), it was a full ISO validated Pascal, and you had full access to all of the file options that the BBC OS and filesystems provided.
It's been such a long time since I looked at Pascal on the BBC micro that I would have to drag down my copy of the Acornsoft Pascal guide to check the syntax, but I see no reason why it could not be done.
Strict standards compliant Pascal was a very limited language. It was always intended to be. There was strict typing, and the I/O you could do was limited, mainly to fixed-length records, and you had to jump through hoops in order to do anything like direct memory access or type casting between different data types (Pascal has pointers, but they are vastly different to what something like 'C' provides). But this was by design, because it was really a teaching language, and intended to teach good programming practices before students learned poor ones, and was meant to be a stepping stone to other languages. The people who wrote the extended Pascals did not really understand the purpose of the language.
I wonder if it even had a need for remote activation at that point. I don't know if they had any anti-theft systems on the first model, which is the primary reason they do online activation these days. In fact, you can activate a modern iPhone without an internet connection as long as it's been properly reset and doesn't still have an activation lock from the last user (whether or not that last user was you).
> In fact, you can activate a modern iPhone without an internet connection as long as it's been properly reset and doesn't still have an activation lock from the last user
Unfortunately not; it always needs to connect to Apple's servers for *some* purpose (I suspect DRM).
They disguise it as anti-theft or (in newer Ventura macOS) firmware fetches but they are really just excuses for Apple to enforce planned obsolescence if needed.
I don't know when that became the case, because I was able to successfully activate an iPhone 5S without an internet connection about three years ago. That may no longer be possible, and it might not even have been possible had that device been running the latest version of IOS available for it, but at the time, I was not prevented from doing it.
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Its value is being there at the start of something big that changed the world, there are always collectors for that sort of thing. The people who collect that sort of stuff generally don't do it hoping to turn a profit.
I used to collect coins/stamps when I was a kid. I still have those collections on a high shelf in a closet, because I figure maybe someday when I'm old and not able to get around as much I might revisit those hobbies. I'm sure I could sell it all for thousands of dollars, but unless I came upon hard times I don't need the money (nor do I want to spend the time going through it and making sure I get a decent price)
Part of the value comes from the thrill, the Russian Roulette feel that makes the jaded rich feel alive, at least for a moment[1]: am I going to hold onto it for too long, will my mansion be the one that burns when the battery finally goes up?
[1] according to the documentaries, such as those with that charming Mr Bond chappie.
Yes people don't give Apple enough credit for this. Steve Jobs is probably the only person who could have possibly convinced a major carrier to give up that control, and even then only due to the huge success of iPod and the hype that had built over the rumored Apple phone.
Perhaps the EU would have eventually saved people in Europe from that carrier control, but here in the US we'd still be stuck using the phones our carriers offered, with whatever features they grudgingly decided to enable!
>Perhaps the EU would have eventually saved people in Europe from that carrier control,
But the phones wouldn't have internet because the telcos would also have been the national post offices who would have worried that email was going to reduce demand for letters and so job losses
I don't agree that it was the first phone that was independent of a network.
I bought a Palm Treo 650 before the iPhone was a thing, and even though it was an Orange branded device, it was able to take SIMs from different networks (the lock in was a contractual one, not a technical one).
But you have to admit that, before devices like the iPhone, Palm Treo's, Nokia Communicators et. al. there was actually little reason to take your handset with you when you switched phone providers. It's only when these high-value phones came along that people wanted to take their handset with them.
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We're guessing no one wants to drop six figures on our scratched-up 3GS or 4 then?
If there is irrefutable evidence that the said device was dropped down the dunny by the man himself, and it is still covered in holy excrement, which has been DNA matched to him, then, in all probability, you'll be able to retire on the sale proceeds