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Rene Ritchie
For as long as Apple has been selling iPhones, people have been scalping them. What makes this particular story interesting is that it's not simply buying in one place and selling higher in another. This is buying and using as pseudo-currency or barter for goods and services. In other words, iPhone-as-money. Vernon Silver, Businessweek:
I’ve been paying my bills with iPhones. Not with apps or on bank sites—I’ve been using the Apple (AAPL) hardware as currency.
It started by accident in December, during a business trip to New York. I live in Rome, where domestic work comes cheap and technology is expensive. An unlocked, gold, 32-gigabyte iPhone 5s that costs about $815 with tax in the U.S. goes for €839 (about $1,130) in Italy, roughly a month’s wages for workers who do laundry, pick up kids from school, or provide care for the elderly. When one worker heard I was visiting the States, she asked me to pick her up an iPhone in lieu of the equivalent cash for work she’d done. Lining up inside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, I was surrounded by shoppers speaking languages from around the world. The salesman looked stunned when I said I wanted an unlocked iPhone. Just one?
That an underground economy is forming around iPhones is no surprise. Jeans and Beatles tapes were once hugely popular in the former Soviet Union. The iPhone is modern pop culture and that always has value.
Have you ever — would you ever — use an iPhone as currency?
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