Caviar’s Apple 50th anniversary collection has been moving faster than the company’s own PR team can keep up with. We covered the Steve Jobs turtleneck edition earlier this month, nine units of a titanium iPhone 17 Pro carrying an authenticated Issey Miyake fabric fragment inside the Apple logo, and by the time most readers had processed whether it was brilliant or absurd, Caviar had already sold out. I’ll admit I did not see that coming. The lesson appears to be that the intersection of Apple mythology and physical relics is a more powerful commercial force than any reasonable person would predict.
So Caviar has returned with an even more loaded artifact for the second release in this anniversary series. The iPhone 2007 embeds a verified fragment of the original iPhone 2G motherboard into the rear panel of an iPhone 17 Pro, sealed beneath an Apple-logo-shaped capsule, ringed by engravings tracing the circuitry of the phone that launched in January 2007. Production is limited to 11 units. Pricing starts at $10,770 for the 256GB Pro and climbs to $12,700 for the 2TB Pro Max, with each phone shipping alongside a 999 fine gold commemorative coin and a signature Caviar key.
Designer: Caviar
The chassis is titanium with a black PVD coating, and the color story it tells is deliberate. Black and silver, offset logo placement, minimalist engraving: Caviar is visually quoting the 2007 original without cosplaying as a replica, which is the smarter move. The motherboard fragment anchors the rear panel at dead center, with circuit-trace engravings fanning outward from it like a schematic that never quite finished rendering. Jobs’ signature runs along the frame. The whole composition functions as a timeline compressed into a single object, 2007 hardware embedded inside 2025 hardware, separated by a few millimeters of machined titanium.
A PCB fragment from a specific hardware generation is an unusually specific kind of artifact. Original iPhone 2G boards have identifiable components, documented manufacturing runs, a physical particularity that places them firmly in a category alongside signed guitars and moon rocks rather than alongside phone cases. Caviar ships each unit with an authentication certificate, and unlike fabric or paper memorabilia, a motherboard fragment from a consumer electronics device has enough physical specificity to make that certificate mean something. At eleven grand, that distinction matters to the kind of buyer who actually reads the certificate rather than frames it.
The original iPhone is one of a very small number of consumer products whose design was so resolved on arrival that the industry spent the following decade catching up to it. Eleven units of the iPhone 2007 will exist in the world, each carrying a physical fragment of that hardware inside Apple’s current best. For the collector who thinks about objects that way, the website link is at the bottom of this page.
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