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iPhone from 2007: The starting signal for Apple's success with smartphones
Photo: Sean Gallup/ Getty Images
A first-generation iPhone out of the box has sold for more than 100 times its original price at a US auction house.
LCG Auctions reports a winning bid of $63,656.40 on its website.
A sale price of around $50,000 was expected prior to the auction.
The minimum bid was set at $2,500.
The iPhone auctioned by LCG Auctions belonged to a woman named Karen Green.
According to the "Insider" portal, friends gave her the mobile phone as a gift in 2007.
At that time, however, they already had three telephone contracts with the provider Verizon, while the iPhone was initially only supported by AT&T.
For years, the Apple device sat unopened and unused on a shelf, wrapped in pajamas, according to Green.
According to CBSNews, Green estimates the price her friends once paid for the device to be between $499 and $599.
According to Insider, Karen Green plans to use the money to fund a cosmetic tattoo studio she recently opened in New Jersey.
»It took me almost a year to set up the studio.
And if you don't have an income for a year because you don't have a job, your resources will dwindle," she was quoted as saying by the US medium in the run-up to the auction.
8GB storage space
Apple introduced the first iPhone in January 2007 and launched it in the US in the summer of 2007.
The device offered, among other things, a touchscreen and a two-megapixel camera, but did not yet support the 3G mobile communications standard, which was referred to as UMTS in this country.
The iPhone model that Green has now auctioned off has eight GB of storage space.
There was also a variant with only four GB.
Previous iPhone auctions, such as RR Auction in August and LCG Auctions in October, sold out of the box 2007 iPhones for $35,414 and $39,339, respectively.
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