The New York Times is reporting that iPhone resales have been a poor investment for would-be resellers. Apparently everyone had the same idea: buy two phones and sell one on eBay/craigslist/et al. for a profit that would pay for the first phone.

Problem is, when everyone has the same idea, the market is instantly flooded and supply greatly outweighs demand.

Couple this with the fact that Apple learned an important lesson from Nintendo (and the Wii) and quickly restocked stores with product, all of the people who camped out for 2 iPhones were stuck a second phone that they could barely sell for a profit. The result: most of the phones went unsold in secondary markets, and are simply being returned for the original price people paid for them, as secondary adopters buy their iPhones straight from Apple.

Whether or not this whole ordeal will have an overall impact on Apple’s sales of the iPhone is something we can’t know, but what we can take away from this all is that Apple did one of the best jobs in the history of marketing to engineer ridiculous demand for one specific product, albeit a cool one.

(story via NYT)

Tags: geekery, news, technology
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