Say that you have US$ 159,000 laying around that you want to invest in gold – but gold ingots don’t have 5G connectivity or 5 nm chipsets. Booo-ring. Caviar has a fix for this issue with the introduction of the Goldphone. There’s two of them, actually, one version is based on the Apple iPhone 12 Pro, the other is based on the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. The latter model is more expensive too, US$ 169,000, even though both have the same amount of gold on them. Only 7 pieces will be made of the iPhone and of the Galaxy versions.
The smartphones are encased in 1,000 grams
of 24-carat gold. That’s 2.2 pounds of the purest gold. Sure, you can buy an
actual gold ingot of that size for about a third of the price, but that ingot
is not going to have a high-quality HDR OLED display, now is it?
By the way, Caviar typically uses 18-carat
gold in its designs – it’s not as pure (or as expensive) as 24-carat, but pure
gold is a very soft metal, not suitable for daily use. So, if you do get a
Goldphone, you might want to forgo the usual silicone case and just put it
inside a safe.
In fact, Caviar did just that – each unit
will be packaged in a “white luxurious case-safe”, each will be delivered to
anywhere in the world by a private courier.
