I thought it was really strange when Apple kept selling the original $299 HomePod months after it got discontinued. 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 willing to pay more than Apple charged for it.
We took a look at eBay sales numbers after spotting 9to5Mac editor-in-chief Chance Miller’s tweet, and we soon discovered it wasn’t just a joke: on average, an Apple HomePod fetched $375 this past week. That’s 25 percent more than Apple charged.
Of course, some HomePods are worth more than others — a used speaker with no box might only net you $220 before eBay fees, but we’ve seen a few factory sealed non-refurbished HomePods sell for over $500. In fact, some sellers are boasting that they got Apple to replace their old HomePods with brand-new units just so they could flip them.
When I filtered out expensive sealed-box outliers, the average sale price was more like $350 this past week. That’s still $50 more than they cost brand-new!
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23402060/ebay_sales_homepod.jpg)
It’s subtle, but you can see in the eBay chart above that the value of a HomePod has been appreciating over the past year since it got discontinued. That’s practically unheard of for gadgets like these, save for scalping situations like we’ve recently seen with consoles and GPUs.
Why the HomePod? That’s a good question. It’s a piece of Apple history, perhaps; you need two of them for stereo or more for whole-home audio; and unlike its more affordable successor the HomePod Mini, it’s 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 realizing it’s the only other option besides the worse-sounding HomePod Mini.
So that’s a working theory for now.
