Incredibly, your Apple HomePod could now be value greater than its $299 MSRP

I believed it was actually unusual when Apple stored promoting the unique $299 HomePod months after it bought discontinued. But 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.

Of course, some HomePods are value greater than others — a used speaker with no field may solely web you $220 earlier than eBay charges, however we’ve seen just a few manufacturing facility sealed non-refurbished HomePods promote for over $500. In truth, some sellers are boasting that they bought Apple to exchange their previous HomePods with brand-new models simply so they may flip them.

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

It’s delicate, however you possibly can see within the eBay chart above that the worth of a HomePod has been appreciating over the previous 12 months because it bought discontinued. That’s virtually exceptional for devices like these, save for scalping conditions like we’ve not too long ago seen with consoles and GPUs.

Why the HomePod? That’s a very good query. It’s a bit of Apple historical past, maybe; you want two of them for stereo; 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 residence is without doubt one of the few locations the place Siri truly excels. She thinks persons are realizing it’s the one different choice in addition to the worse-sounding HomePod Mini.

So that’s a working idea for now.