Man Replaces iPhone 5 Home Button with $14.5M 26-carat Black Diamond [PICS]

How much are your family jewels worth? One Hong Kong businessman had a $14.5 million 26-carat black diamond as part of his family heirlooms. What does one do with such an expensive and rare stone? Put it up for auction and get the cash? Donate it to a museum to show off to the world? Nah, that would be too sensible and sane. How about using the stone to replace the Home button on an iPhone 5? Yeah, that sounds about just right.

The businessman, known only as “Joe” contacted craftsman Stuart Hughes of Liverpool to commission the project of making the world’s most expensive iPhone. Hughes said 18 months ago he was contacted by Joe about gold iPhone chassis handsets and eventually revealed he had a black diamond, part of his family heirloom for generations. Hughes says he saw the appraisal for the black diamond worth $14.5 million dollars.

Hughes then went on to recreate the chassis of the iPhone 5 with solid gold by hand, a 9 week project. The chassis also contains 600 white flawless diamonds, the back of the iPhone is covered in 24ct gold with another 53 flawless diamonds. There is a total of 135 grams of 24ct gold on the iPhone 5, plus the screen has also been covered with sapphire glass.

Are there even actual images of the phone in the wild? In an interview with CNN:

“We had a tech guy in Macau who was able to set the stone, which to this day has never left China,” Hughes said.

Interesting. The provided images from Hughes’ website look like concepts, so it’s hard to know what the actual phone looks like. I hope “Joe” has Find My iPhone activated, because it would suck if he lost this phone.

Would you ever bling out your iPhone with diamonds and gold? Maybe if you were Flavor Fav…

[via CNN]