Wright Auctions, the leading auction house for modern design, has just signed a multi-million dollar contract for a wooden table by Hans Wegner, a sofa by George Nakashima, and a chair designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen.
At an auction set to take place this past Thursday, a new item topped the list: a first-generation iPhone still in factory packaging.
Smaller than a Cedric Hartman table lamp and less elegant than the Yves Klein table that was also up for auction that day, the 2007 iPhone still had a starting bid of $32,000—a price potential buyers had to be willing to pay just to register for the auction. Wright Auctions had expected the winning bid to be between $40,000 and $60,000.
It doesn't matter that iPhones manufactured before 2015 are no longer compatible with Apple's latest iOS 16 operating system, or that the hard drive on these early iPhones manufactured in 2007 had a maximum capacity of 8GB, or that the listed price of this iPhone at the time of launch was only $599.
The first iPhone, still in its original factory packaging. Photo: Rago/Wright
“There are very few tangible objects in history that have changed the world,” said Richard Wright, president of Wright Auctions, in a call Tuesday from his Chicago office on the 512GB iPhone 14 he bought in January . “This is one of those objects.”
In January 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone to an enthusiastic crowd at the MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Six months later, the iPhone went on sale. In a New York Times article, David Pogue said that the device lived up to buyers’ expectations, calling it “a beautiful little handheld computer whose screen is just a piece of touch-sensitive glass.”
Wright also noted that the classic iPhone has “a pure user interface and clear information” that recalls the revolutionary mid-century industrial designs of Dieter Rams, a designer whose products for Braun and furniture collections for Vitsœ+Zapf were the subject of a 2011 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art and also inspired a 2018 auction at Wright Auctions.
But, this is probably not the most effective comparison Mr. Wright could have come up with.
The Dieter Rams auction was, as he put it, a “brainchild,” meaning it didn’t do much financially. The winning bidder for the Bauhaus-inspired electronics paid $32 for a 1975 clock and $1,750 for a 1975 black-and-white Super 8 camera. The highest bidder, at $8,450, was a 1960 leather, aluminum, and fiberglass sofa.
Nguyen Quang Minh (According to Nytimes)
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