iPhone with USB-C Mod Sells for $86,000 USD on eBay

According to The Verge, the world’s first USB-C iPhone — an iPhone X modified to replace its Lightning port with a USB-C connector by robotics engineering student Kenn Pillonel, has sold on eBay for a whopping $86,001 USD after a week of bidding.

The device’s seemingly outrageous sale price actually isn’t all that absurd. Even though Pillonel has open-sourced his work on the project by putting everything from the technical details and CNC instructions to information on the custom PCB design he used for the mod into a Github repository, the process requires an extraordinary level of skill and precision.

To get both charging and data transfer working through the USB-C port, Pillonel had to install extra circuitry into the phone’s chassis — no small feat considering the complexity of Apple’s designs.

Bidding for the iPhone started at $1 USD, but broke $3,000 USD at the end of day one. Bids started growing exponentially from then on, with a total of 116 bids, of which a few exceeded $100,000 USD. All of the bids higher than $86,001 USD were retracted before the auction came to an end.

Pillonel’s mod is the first iPhone to have a USB-C port on it, and will also be the only one of its kind until someone replicates his design (or Apple finally gives in to the EU’s demands and ditches Lightning on the iPhone for USB-C).

However, Pillonel warned bidders that actually using the device as a regular phone, disassembling it, or updating iOS could risk breaking it. Gotcha.