How much would you be willing to pay for an old, used iPad? Probably not too much. But what if that iPad once belonged to Pope Francis?
One bidder just ponied up a cool $35,000 for an Apple tablet once owned by the head of the Catholic Church, according to Reuters. The iPad sold at auction in Uruguay Tuesday, and the proceeds will be donated to a local school for the poor.
The iPad reportedly found its way to the Castells auction house in Uruguay's capital of Montevideo after the pope himself gave it to Uruguayan priest Gonzalo Aemilius.
"May you do something good with it," Aemilius recalled the pope saying at the time, according to Reuters.
Aemilius donated the iPad to the Francisco de Paysandu high school, located about 230 miles north of Montevideo. School officials tried several times to sell the iPad through auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's, but that idea didn't pan out, so they turned to local auctioneer Castells.
The device is engraved with the inscription "His Holiness Francisco. Servizio Internet Vatican, March 2013," and comes with a certificate signed by the Pope's secretary, Fabian Pedacchio Leaniz. Castells said the winning bid was placed by telephone, but declined to name the buyer.
The iPad will join a number of other vintage Apple products that have fetched big bucks at auction. In October, one of the first computers Apple ever produced sold for a record $905,000 at auction in New York, far surpassing expectations.
In addition, in 2013, a working Apple-1 sold for $671,000 at an auction in Germany, surpassing the previous record of $640,000 set by the same auction house in November. Before that, Sotheby's in New York sold one for $374,500.
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