Apple buys iPhone.com for seven figures

It's hard to accuse Michael Kovatch of squatting the iPhone.com domain for his perpetually to-be-created internet phone company -- he snagged it way back in the halcyon days of '95 when Jobs was still estranged and the only mobile phones were Zack Morris mobile phones. Well, users visiting iphone.com will finally get sent to Apple's iPhone page, as the DomainTools Blog is reporting Apple bought it, and for a solid seven figures at that.

[Thanks, Toby]

Read - iPhone.com (see, it really forwards)
Read - iPhone.com gets bought

[kurter21 @ Jul 3rd 2007 11:45AM]

Wow, i wish i was that guy right now. That definately proves how some things increase in value over time.

-Stone

[therpham @ Jul 3rd 2007 11:46AM]

Jackpot.

[Dan @ Jul 3rd 2007 11:50AM]

Only 7 figures?

[darkstar @ Jul 3rd 2007 11:53AM]

shoulda
coulda
woulda.....

[Seamus Bartlett @ Jul 3rd 2007 12:01PM]

**quickly registers iCar.com, iStove.com, iHouse.com, iPresident.com, iI.com, iRandomHiTechDevice.com**

[idontthinkso @ Jul 3rd 2007 12:16PM]

..I don't think so domain buddy.. all these domains are already gone, rightly after the iphone announcement or even before (execept iRandomHiTechDevice.com, get that!!^)

[Grant @ Jul 5th 2007 9:54AM]

"all these domains are already gone, rightly after the iphone announcement or even before"

please, those domains were gone a week after the iPod came out, lol.

As for this guy, he just got lucky(or not so lucky if he's had the domain for 12 years and done nothing with it), a good amount of people are actually out there domain squatting, grabbing as many tech sounding domains, hoping that the ones they are holding will be named the same as the next big thing.

[Atanas Boev @ Jul 3rd 2007 12:03PM]

Well, that is wat Apple got from selling ~ 5000 iPhones (if the figure of $380 production cost was correct). And if they sold 700000 iPhones for two days, that is (click, click) what they got for 20 minutes :)

[JeffDM @ Jul 3rd 2007 1:11PM]

Don't kid yourself on the costs for the device. The estimated production costs doesn't cover advertising, distribution, packaging, included accessories, brick & mortar retailer mark-up, taxes, insurance, software development, hardware design, testing and so on.

[Long @ Jul 3rd 2007 2:32PM]

"Don't kid yourself on the costs for the device. The estimated production costs doesn't cover advertising, distribution, packaging, included accessories, brick & mortar retailer mark-up, taxes, insurance, software development, hardware design, testing and so on."

This would be true if Apple was a new company and created the iPhone. Have you noticed that there's no more ipod commercials. The marketing department now is making iphone commericals. There is not that much extra budget cost from switching commercials for one product to another other than making the commercials.

As for the other costs, rather than shipping millions of ipods to their stores and such, they are shipping more iphones. The supply chain hasn't change much. Instead of sending ipods to Best Buy and the other retailers, they send it to ATT stores.

Software development and hardware design is not that big of budget cost since they already have people doing that for them, and they get paid a normal salary. Apple pulled some people from OSX team to work on the iphone, but that didn't necessarily moved up the budget cost.

The only cost that went up should be for testing since you need to test it more than the ipod. But if you look at it, they got some of their employees to test it out.

[Guy @ Jul 20th 2007 2:08AM]

Marketing and distribution costs absolutely count toward the overall costs of producing the iPhone. Just because they may be re-allocated from other Apple products (if they are) doesn't make them any less real.

In fact, taking them away from other products means that they're not available for the other products.

Profits equals total revenues minus total costs. Costs allocated to the iPhone come out of the iPhone's profits. Period.

[Steve @ Jul 3rd 2007 12:36PM]

This is bogus. iPhone has re-directed to Apple's homepage for years.

[Jeremy K. @ Jul 3rd 2007 12:57PM]

um... no. http://web.archive.org/web/20070205015019/http://www.iphone.com/

Though that link doesn't show anything, the source shows that it does not redirect to apple.com. The archived link above is from February 5, 2007. It also shows a link to an image... located at the new iphone.com website.

The new iphone.com is now located at https://iphone.nuvio.com/html/

[Craig @ Jul 3rd 2007 1:24PM]

just the other day i was curious as to whether apple owned iphone.com, and it definitely took me to kovatch's original site

[Steve @ Jul 3rd 2007 3:47PM]

That link didn't show anything. I could be mistaken, but maybe is was iPhone.org, but I know that about 5 years ago I entered that address and it went to Apple's home page.

[J @ Jul 3rd 2007 1:10PM]

I'm surprised that Apple hasn't tried to sue iPhone (The Internet Phone Company) for using "their" name. Sure the Internet Phone Company has been around longer than the iMac or iPod - but they could still try.

[Mike @ Jul 3rd 2007 1:24PM]

they did it with itunes.co.uk even though that was registered way before ITMS was formed

[Bhaal @ Jul 3rd 2007 5:55PM]

itunes.co.uk is a bit different. In the UK you can't register a domain to 'cyber-squat' - just use it for a random search engine and not actually run a real site from it only to demand a lot of money from someone who wants to buy it. I believe the court determined in that instance that was what the owner was doing hence why Apple won.

[albert @ Jul 3rd 2007 2:05PM]

nothing new, apple paid almost a million dollars for appleimac.com

[Sven @ Jul 3rd 2007 3:10PM]

Oh boy...

[Mike @ Jul 3rd 2007 3:22PM]

now, for todays lesson decimal places

theres, Ones, Tens, Hundreds, Thousands, Ten Thousands, Hundred Thousands, Millions

now that you've been properly educated, you can go take recess, i recommend playing on the freeway

[ethana2 @ Jul 3rd 2007 3:23PM]

If that guy put that money in a paypal money market account for two weeks, he'd get more money in interest than the average person earns in a... lifetime?

Time for a new kind of dictionary attack. ICANN, here I come. ;)
'course that's like playing the lottery... which mandates somewhere in the agreement that if you win, 237 innocent people will be struck by lightning or whatever.
So I'll just keep my money. Still, you gotta envy the deal that guy got.

Like my brother in law's best friend, who sold his forehead as advertising space- sold to snore stop for like 50,000 dollars.

[patrick @ Jul 3rd 2007 4:22PM]

And then you are an idiot for putting your money into Paypal @ 5%, when you could put it into a real money market fund and get 15% a year. (Average, over 10 years)

[ethana2 @ Jul 3rd 2007 5:18PM]

Seriously?! Wow. What are the risk factors that would be involved, and what is the smallest amount of money you can invest? How hard is it? Does it fluctuate alot? Can you withdraw it via ebay? Tell me more.

[Antipodeanist @ Jul 3rd 2007 3:48PM]

Still shows up in Google's cache as The Internet Phone Company.

[Marek @ Jul 3rd 2007 4:38PM]

Hello, I have domain http://www.iphone.cz. Do you need this domain?

[Colin @ Jul 4th 2007 1:38AM]

Yes! I will put it in my portfolio of corporate domains that do not exist. I'm only ~$6m in the hole so far, but my big break is coming soon!

[Calvin @ Jul 3rd 2007 6:10PM]

I think the iPhone is overrated and overpriced, but THE OFFICE! And whoever wrote the original article's name was Toby. That is awesome.

[Dan @ Jul 3rd 2007 7:00PM]

No no... a shabidylouilion!

[David @ Jul 3rd 2007 7:05PM]

I find it rather amusing that the responders to this post failed to recognize the sarcastic sillyness of the original poster and instead took it in a serious tone and felt the need to point out the obviously implied incorrect conclusion.

Hello?! It's called sarcasm. The original poster clearly knows that 7 figures does not make a billion.

[Michael A. Banks @ Jul 4th 2007 10:59PM]

I wonder if this marks some kind of record for sitting on a domain name?
--Mike

[iMchael @ Jul 9th 2007 9:12AM]

Wow, what's up with the Zack references today??

[STIEN @ Jul 30th 2007 11:36AM]

Wait...oh i get it now!!! u were just demonstrating being sarcastic or ur just really that stupid!!