Incredibly, your Apple HomePod may now be worth more than its $299 MSRP

I found it really strange when Apple continued to sell the original HomePod for $299 months after has been canceled. 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 asked for it.

After the discovery, we looked at the eBay sales figures 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 over the past week. That’s 25 percent more than Apple calculated.

Of course, some HomePods are worth more than others — a used speaker without a box might set you back just $220 before eBay fees, but we’ve seen some factory-sealed, non-refurbished HomePods sell for over $500. In fact, some sellers boast that they got Apple to replace their old HomePods with brand new ones just so they can flip them.

When I filtered out expensive outliers from sealed boxes, the average selling price over the past week was closer to $350. That’s still $50 more than they cost brand new!

eBay screenshot of Sean Hollister / The Verge

It’s subtle, but you can see the value of a HomePod in the eBay chart above has I have gained weight over the past year since it was discontinued. That’s virtually unheard of for devices like this, apart from scalping situations as we have recently seen with consoles and GPUs.

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

So that’s a working theory for now.