Enlarge / The auction ran from June 30 to July 16. (credit: Getty )

If you shopped for a new smartphone today and were offered a model with 4GB of storage, you'd probably laugh. That's what most shoppers did when seeing the original iPhone, considering that the 8GB model was only $100 more. Nowadays, you can get an iPhone with a whopping 1TB of storage. But that didn't stop a collector from shelling out $ 190,372.80 for an original 4GB iPhone at an auction that closed yesterday.

Before yesterday, the highest a 2007 iPhone ever sold for was $63,356.40 . The sale occurred through LCG Auctions and was for an 8GB model, which originally went for $599.

The smaller-storage model just beat the first-generation iPhone's auction record by 200.48 percent, selling for an astounding 38,050.86 percent more than its original $499 MSRP. After 28 bids, the outrageous final selling price includes a $158,644 final bid, plus administration costs. LCG Auctions thought the phone would sell for $50,000 to $100,000, but the collectible surpassed expectations.

Enlarge (credit: Getty )

Selling a new smartphone is the hardest it has been in years. Rising device costs, limited differences between model upgrades, and economic and environment-related desires to keep electronics alive as long as possible are making people turn to refurbished phones, data shared this week by analyst Counterpoint found. And if someone is buying a refurbished phone, there's a good chance it's an iPhone.

According to Counterpoint, Apple represented 49 percent of refurbished phones sold worldwide in 2022. The number of refurbished iPhones sold increased 16 percent year-over-year, with the overall used smartphone market growing 5 percent year-over-year, Counterpoint said. The numbers would be even higher, but a reported 17 percent drop in refurbished smartphone sales in China—driven, the firm said, by an increase in COVID-19 cases and related policies—was detrimental.

By Counterpoint's measures, Apple grew its market share here from 44 percent in 2021 to 49 percent. Samsung is the biggest competitor, but it lost market share.

Enlarge (credit: Getty )

The end is near for a bunch of old telecommunications tech in China. On Monday, the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced that as of March 1, it will no longer issue permits for fax machines, pagers, or integrated services digital network (ISDN) terminals to access Chinese networks.

The announcement, spotted by The Register , also applies to "fixed telephone terminals, cordless telephone terminals, [and] group telephones," as well as modems, "multimedia terminals connected to mobile communication networks," and "frame relay for 11 types of telecommunications equipment," including switches and call center equipment, per a Google translation.

While existing products will still be able to connect to Chinese networks, the country will not issue permits for new products that rely on these dated technologies.

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  The Pixel 7 Pro innards (bottom) look a lot neater than those of the Pixel 6 Pro (top). The graphite thermal tape (the shiny black stuff on the Pixel 6, the matte black sticker on the Pixel 7) has a larger surface area over the hot parts of the Pixel 7. [credit: PBK Reviews / Ron Amadeo ]

The Pixel 7 is still on its way, but that isn't stopping the Internet from tearing it down already. In what's becoming a tradition , PBK Reviews is the first to rip apart the device, specifically the Pixel 7 Pro. Now we can do some fun comparisons between this teardown and last year's.

Just as it looks on the outside, the Pixel 7 Pro is pretty close to the Pixel 6 Pro, but you can spot some refinements. Google has done a much neater job with the graphite thermal tape this year. The Pixel 6 Pro had three different sections of thermal tape, but there's now one monolithic block of graphite covering the cameras, SoC, and battery.

On the Pixel 6, the graphite sticker had to be multiple parts because Google didn't want to cover up the mmWave antenna wire, which last year ran overtop of the battery. On the Pixel 7 Pro, the mmWave antenna cable is way longer and runs around the perimeter of the battery under the metal mid-frame. With no cable in the way, the thermal tape can have a way larger surface area overtop of the battery, camera, and SoC. Google removed some thermal tape that was previously close to the USB-C port, but with the process node reduction and more tape concentrated around the SoC, this should hopefully lead to a cooler phone.