Incredibly, your Apple HomePod may now be worth more than its $299 MSRP

I assumed it was actually unusual when Apple saved promoting the unique $299 HomePod months after it acquired discontinued. However now, it’s beginning to make sense — not solely are some individuals nonetheless keen to pay a premium for the considerably sensible speaker, they’re keen to pay greater than Apple charged for it.

We took a have a look at eBay gross sales numbers after recognizing 9to5Mac editor-in-chief Chance Miller’s tweet, and we quickly found it wasn’t only a joke: on common, an Apple HomePod fetched $375 this previous week. That’s 25 p.c greater than Apple charged.

In fact, some HomePods are value greater than others — a used speaker with no field may solely internet you $220 earlier than eBay charges, however we’ve seen a couple of manufacturing unit sealed non-refurbished HomePods promote for over $500. In truth, some sellers are boasting that they acquired Apple to switch their outdated HomePods with brand-new models simply so they might flip them.

After I filtered out costly sealed-box outliers, the typical sale worth was extra like $350 this previous week. That’s nonetheless $50 greater than they price brand-new!

It’s refined, however you’ll be able to see within the eBay chart above that the worth of a HomePod has been appreciating over the previous yr because it acquired discontinued. That’s virtually unprecedented for devices like these, save for scalping conditions like we’ve just lately seen with consoles and GPUs.

Why the HomePod? That’s an excellent query. It’s a chunk of Apple historical past, maybe; you want two of them for stereo or extra for whole-home audio; and in contrast to its extra reasonably priced successor the HomePod Mini, it’s acoustically fairly good. My colleague Jen Tuohy has additionally defined that the sensible dwelling is likely one of the few locations the place Siri really excels. She thinks individuals are realizing it’s the one different choice apart from the worse-sounding HomePod Mini.

In order that’s a working concept for now.