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Someone is selling an extremely rare prerelease iPhone prototype from 2006 on eBay, and the bids have already crossed $13,000 (AAPL)
Ebay
An iPhone prototype from 2006 is up for auction on eBay.
Over 70 bids have been made for it, bringing the price up to $13,200 on Wednesday.
The device was last sold in a private transaction in 2015 for $8,000, a person familiar with the device told Business Insider.
There's a subculture of Apple fans who trade and sell prototype devices.
A fascinating piece of Apple history is currently available on eBay.
A device sold by 321dady seems to be an iPhone that was used for testing inside Apple in late 2006, before the iPhone was revealed to the world by Steve Jobs in 2007.
Apple fans have bid on the item 72 times, bringing the price to over $13,000 on Wednesday. The 10-day auction still has several days before it closes.
The listing says the phone runs Earthbound, an internal Apple operating system that provides access to testing and development tools, as well as Apple OS X, a desktop operating system. When the iPhone launched in 2007, Jobs said it ran a full version of OS X.
Screenshot/Ebay
According to the listing, the device was handmade, has custom internal hardware, and is heavier than the iPhone that was eventually released. The listing says it's a "DVT" prototype, or a design verification testing device, meaning it was produced before "PVT" testing, the engineering stage before mass production.
Not the real price
According to the listing, this phone was previously listed on eBay in 2015, when bidding reached $61,000.
However, that eBay listing was taken down, and the device was eventually sold privately for $8,000, according to a person with knowledge of the prototype phone who is not the seller.
"This is definitely one of the rarer units," the person told Business Insider.
Apple prototypes are of heavy interest to a certain subculture of Apple fans who collect prerelease prototypes and nonpublic Apple software.
Prototype devices like this one were often given to or taken by Apple engineers at the end of a project as a souvenir, according to collectors in the community, and some of them eventually make their way onto the market.
Typically, Apple doesn't acknowledge the market for these unreleased but obsolete devices unless they are traded on public forums like Craigslist and eBay. Apple often requests that posts like this one are taken down when they're on public websites. Most trades and sales happen on private channels, according to collectors.
Check out some of the photos:
Ebay
Ebay
Ebay
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