Watch YouTube star unbox a sealed iPhone 1.0 he bought for $40,000

[frauenfelder]

Originally published at: Watch YouTube star unbox a sealed iPhone 1.0 he bought for $40,000 | Boing Boing

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[VeronicaConnor]

@frauenfelder

if no one can tell if a shrink-wrapped iPhone has never been touched before, what’s the difference

Retro gamers have gone pretty deep on this. It turns out that the home shrink wrap machines that you can buy work slightly differently than the big factory machines do. So if you know what to look for (where the seams and air vents are, etc) you can tell if something was shrink wrapped by (for example) Nintendo or by someone at home trying to sell a clean rare cart as NIB to triple the price.

As an aside, as a retrocomputer enthusiast, I find it weirdly fascinating to see how younger folks are nostalgic for things like early smartphones from the 2010s. For me they are just slightly worse versions of current things. Nostalgia for me is computers from the 1970s and 1980s (which also do still ocassionally come up new in box). It’s easy to be blinded by my own experience and not understand what kids today get nostalgic for in an iPhone 1. But then, my dad doesn’t understand why I love my Commodore 64 and Apple II so much. Whatever you had in your formative years, I guess!

[dabeyc]

i can’t generate a large enough yawn for these youtubers and their collective worship of the phone.