Wright Auctions, a leading venue for contemporary design items, has landed five-figure bids for a Hans Wegner deska George Nakashima couch and a chair designed by Charles Eames and Today Saarinen.
For an auction that will take place on Thursday, there is a new item at the top of the list: a first generation Apple iPhone in its original packaging.
Smaller than a Cedric Hartman desk lamp, and not as obvious a status item as, say, Yves Klein’s table a few lots over, the 2007 iPhone starts at $32,000. That’s how much a prospective buyer must be willing to spend just to get in on the action. Wright Auctions estimates that the winning bid is likely to be between $40,000 and $60,000.
Never mind that iPhones produced before 2015 are incompatible with Apple’s latest operating system, iOS 16. Or that the iPhone’s hard drive in 2007 allowed up to only 8 gigabytes. Or that the list price for that model was $599.
“There are so few tangible design objects that they just change everything,” said Richard Wright, president of Wright Auctions, speaking Tuesday from his Chicago offices about the 512-gigabyte iPhone 14 he bought in January. “This is that tangible object.”
Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone to an excited crowd at the MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco in January 2007. Six months later, it was in stores. Writing in The New York Times, David Pogue said the device lived up to expectations, calling it “a beautiful little handheld computer whose screen is a touch-sensitive glass slab.”
Mr. Wright added that the “purity of the user interface and clarity of information” of the vintage iPhone dates back to the revolutionary mid-century industrial designs of Dieter Rams, whose work on electronics for Braun and furniture collections for Vitsœ+Zapf were the subject of a 2011 Retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and inspiration for a 2018 auction at Wright Auctions.
Though perhaps that wasn’t the best parallel Mr. Wright drew.
As he noted, the Dieter Rams auction was “a labor of love,” meaning it was a rather fruitless financial endeavor. Winning bidders for his Bauhaus-inspired electronics paid $32 for a 1975 black alarm clock and $1,750 for a black and white super 8 cameraalso from 1975. The most expensive object sold, for an offer of $8,450 — was a 1960s sofa made of leather, aluminum, and fiberglass.
The auction involving the 2007 iPhone will begin at noon Central Daylight Time. Bidders can participate online or by phone.
The $32,000 price floor was partly because there is a precedent for what an unopened first-generation iPhone will sell for: Last month, an unopened iPhone sold for $63,356 through LCG Auctions, a Louisiana consignor. .
The only thing that is revealed about the provenance of the one to be sold through Wright is that it came to Mr. Wright via Donald Gajadhar, a New York appraiser specializing in antiques and decorative arts.
In an interview, Mr. Gajadhar did not want to divulge the name of the seller, saying only that he was a New Yorker who worked in finance and had a high profile on the social scene.
“I think I have said too much,” he added.
He then went on to say more, noting that this particular iPhone was given to its mysterious owner by a business friend shortly after its launch in June 2007. At the time, Gajadhar said, the man wasn’t ready to part with his Motorola Razr phone. .
The marketing of the Razr phone focused almost entirely on its light weight and sleek design. In 3.5 ounces, was listed as the thinnest cell phone on the market. The rival iPhone weighed 4.8 ounces.
“He loved the Razr like it was a Star Trek communicator,” Gajadhar said. “And he wasn’t really on social media. He used it for calls, not apps.”
The business friend kept asking the man if he liked the gift, continued Mr. Gajadhar. And the man repeatedly avoided giving his friend an honest answer: that the iPhone was in a drawer, unopened. By the time you finally joined the modern world and bought yourself one, the 2007 model was outdated.
As Mr. Gajadhar said, the client now feels too guilty to come clean. But the fact that he can raise enough to finance a BMW could be another reason for the owner to remain in the shadows. (Who wants to share?)
