Apple Watches are already hitting eBay with wildly inflated price tags

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Were you asleep when the Apple Watch preorders started? If this is how you sleep, you may still be able to get one. Photo: AMC

Did you get to your computer too late to get one of the earliest shipping Apple Watches? No problem: Confirmed preorders are already showing up on eBay.

At a premium, of course.

Take this Apple Watch Sport with Silver Aluminum Case with white 38mm wrist band, for instance. Normally costing $349, its eBay seller is asking for $599, with the promise that you’ll have it by late April. Or this May 13 preorder for an Apple Watch Sport with much-sought-after Space Gray Aluminium Case and a black 42mm band. Apple asks for $399. eBay seller futuretreasuresnc wants a mere $969, plus shipping.

If waiting until May is too much, you could get it three weeks earlier for $1,299.99, plus P&P.

The highest-priced Apple Watch I could find was this 38mm Apple Watch Edition with 18-karat Yellow Gold Case and black Sport buckle. Sold by Apple for $10,000, leonp55 is hoping to make an easy $5,000 by ramping the price up to $15,000 for his confirmed May preorder. While charging 50 percent over the already high cost of the device may sound steep, the Apple Watch Edition is by far the rarest of the Apple Watches — with shipping dates already slipping back to August.

Ultimately, it’s a fascinating market-driven experiment to see just how much people are willing to pay for the Apple Watch. My gut instinct is that a lot of the sellers charging a premium for the lower-priced Apple Watches are going to come away disappointed, but the likes of leonp55 could actually come out ahead.

After all, when you’ve got upward of $10,000 to drop on a first-generation piece of technology that’s likely to be obsolete in a year, an extra $5,000 is probably the equivalent of a cup of coffee for the rest of us.

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