Incredibly, your Apple HomePod may now be worth more than its $299 suggested retail price

I thought it was really odd when Apple kept selling the original $299 HomePod months after it was 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 looked at eBay’s sales figures after spotting 9to5Mac Editor-in-Chief Chance Miller’s Tweet, and we quickly learned it wasn’t just a joke: An Apple HomePod averaged $375 in the past week. That’s 25 percent more than Apple charged.

Sure, some HomePods are worth more than others — a used box-less speaker might run you as little as $220 before eBay fees, but we’ve seen a pair of factory-sealed unrefurbished HomePods sell for over $500. Some sellers even boast that they got Apple to replace their old HomePods with brand new units so they could flip them over.

When I filtered out expensive closed-box outliers, the average retail price for the past week was over $350. That’s still $50 more than they cost new!

eBay screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

It’s subtle, but you can see in the eBay chart above that the value of a HomePod has has appreciated for the past year since it was discontinued. That’s practically unheard of for gadgets like this, except for scalping situations like we’ve seen recently with consoles and GPUs.

Why the HomePod? That is a good question. It might be a piece of Apple history; you’ll need two for stereo or more for whole-home audio; and unlike its more affordable successor, the HomePod Mini, it’s pretty good acoustically. My colleague Jen Tuohy also explained that the smart home is one of the few places where Siri really excels. She thinks people are realizing that this is the only other option besides the worse sounding HomePod Mini.

So that’s a working theory for now.