I thought it was really weird when Apple kept selling the original HomePod for $ 299 months after it was released. But now it’s starting to make sense – not only are some people still willing to pay a premium for the somewhat smart speaker, they’re also willing to pay more than Apple took for it.
We took a look at the eBay sales figures after seeing them 9to5Macs editor-in-chief Chance Miller’s tweet, and we quickly discovered that it’s not just a joke: on average, an Apple HomePod fetched $ 375 in the last week. That’s 25 percent more than Apple charged.
Of course, some HomePods are worth more than others – a used boxless speaker might only give you $ 220 before eBay fees, but we’ve seen a few factory sealed non-refurbished HomePods sell for over $ 500. In fact, some vendors boast that they got Apple to replace their old HomePods with brand new devices just so they could flip them.
When I filtered out expensive sealed boxes, the average selling price was more like $ 350 in the last week. It’s still $ 50 more than they cost brand new!
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It’s subtle, but you can see in the eBay chart above that the value of a HomePod have been appreciated over the past year since it was discontinued. It’s practically unheard of for gadgets like these, except for scalping situations that we’ve seen recently with consoles and GPUs.
Why HomePod? That’s a good question. It may be a piece of Apple history; you need two of them for stereo or more for audio throughout the home; and unlike its more affordable successor HomePod Mini, it is acoustically quite good. My colleague Jen Tuohy has also explained that the smart home is one of the few places where Siri actually excels. She thinks people are aware that this is the only other option besides the poorer-sounding HomePod Mini.
So that’s a working theory for now.