British designer builds $15m iPhone for Hong Kong mogul
Home button is a 26-carat black diamond
Conspicuous consumption is a sign of booming times, and a Hong Kong businessman may have broken records for it after buying a custom-built "iPhone 5 Black Diamond" encrusted in gold and precious stones. The tab? An eye-popping $15.3m (£10m).
For the man who has everything – except taste
"This beautiful handset took 9 weeks of detailed intricate work to re-create the original chassis of the iPhone 5 in solid gold all of which was started and finished by hand, including a flawless black single deep cut diamond weighing in at 26 cts, most unique to replace the home button also the chassis was inlaid with a circa of 600 white flawless diamonds with full gold dressing for the rear section with the logo in solid gold with 53 flawless diamonds," gushed the designer, Liverpudlian Stuart Hughes.
The businessman in question won't pay the full whack for his handset since he provided the huge home-screen diamond that makes up the bulk of the handset's value. The phone will make a hole in his pocket in more ways than one however, since the gold used in the casing weighs more than the phone itself.
Hughes has broken the million-dollar price point for the iPhone before, crafting a $2.97m (£1.93m) iPhone 3GS in 2011 and a diamond-encrusted iPhone 4S worth a reported $9m (£5.89m). Hughes also carries extra heavy MacBook Air's with gold and platinum covers, as well as blinging up phones from BlackBerry and Nokia.
"People say to me what makes you the best," Hughes said. "One word for that is that I've got to be the craziest by far."
Crazy is certainly the phrase for a handset that costs more money than most people will see in a lifetime's hard labor. It also applies for a handset that will be rapidly outdated, based on the current pace of smartphone development.
The iPhone 5 is a good-enough handset – it has LTE, a decent amount of memory, and a beautifully sharp (if rather small) screen. But it doesn't have near-field communications, fingerprint recognition, or wireless charging – innovations rumored for the next iPhone handset.
But one suspects the owner of the iPhone Black Diamond isn't really that bothered about having the most advanced smartphone out there – just the most expensive one. ®
COMMENTS
Sorry, but this story is completely fake
http://brianwhelan.net/post/12322686909/fools-gold-how-stuart-hughes-tricked-the-global-press
I made the mistake of working for this guy
He employed me to do a 3d render of a gold plated retro cellphone (for what he said was "visualisation" purposes). Stupidly I didn't do much background research on him, because it doesn't take much more than a cursory google to uncover the kind of things he gets up to (which begs the question - why can't journos be bothered to do this?)
Meanwhile I did the images and then never got paid. I had to take him to small claims court, but despite being awarded the judgment against him, he never responded to any communication or paid me. Bailiffs didn't seem to be an option as it seemed his company was registered under a false address.
The various media outlets he spammed duly published the pics as real items. A quick search reveals they are even on this very site (bottom pic)....http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/24/stuart_hughes_luxury_items/)
In theory I could try to get all the pictures I did taken down from the various media organisations he'd spammed his press release with. But life's too short, it was 3 years ago, and I'm still not entirely sure how that works in the UK. (no DMCA?)
So - I'd be 100% certain that some hapless unpaid photoshop/3d lackey mocked these pictures up, and the whole story is total nonsense.
I know...
I know it's his money, yadda yadda... But that's just plain stupid. How boring must someone's life be to be interested in something like that, really? Don't take me wrong, I sure like the good things in life that money can buy. But a phone like that isn't it. It's kind of sad. Only thing sadder than that is that I don't have even 1% of the wealth he has, heh.
I hope he doesn't have to RMA it...
Actually, then again, I hope he does. I hope he has "Find My Phone" turned on as well...
Maybe he chose the iPhone because he couldn't afford to encrust the larger Samsung Galaxy with gold and jewels?
