Only 9 units exist — and someone is going to buy them
Somewhere in the world, there are people for whom an iPhone 17 Pro costing ₹1,29,999 is not enough of a statement. For those people, Caviar — the Russian luxury phone customization studio that has made a career out of gold-plated, diamond-studded, historically significant collector phones — has created something that is either the ultimate Apple collectible or the most elaborate piece of fan merchandise ever attempted.
It's called JOBS. It's an iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max with a tiny square of fabric from Steve Jobs' actual turtleneck embedded in the Apple logo on the back. The price starts at $9,630 — roughly ₹8,03,000 at current exchange rates. Only 9 units were made. According to Caviar, only 2 are left.
What you actually get for ₹8 lakh
Let's talk about the physical object, because the design is genuinely thoughtful regardless of what you think about the price. The JOBS iPhone takes the iPhone 17 Pro as its base and transforms the back with a black panel that deliberately references the original iPhone 2G from 2007. The silver titanium body is finished with a PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) coating — the same technique used to coat aerospace components and high-end watches for scratch resistance and color consistency.
The black back panel has Steve Jobs' signature reproduced on it. And in the Apple logo — the logo that Jobs himself approved every iteration of — there's a tiny square cutout containing a fragment of fabric from a turtleneck that Jobs wore. The authenticity of the fabric is certified by a certificate that comes with the phone.
The number 9 is deliberate and layered. January 9, 2007 was the date Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone at Macworld. January 9, 2017 would have been the iPhone's 10th anniversary. Caviar made exactly 9 units as a reference to that date. The packaging is custom deluxe, and each unit comes with a "signature Caviar key." There's also a wallpaper made exclusively for these 9 devices.
The turtleneck's actual origin — and a small historical note
Caviar describes the fabric as coming from Jobs' turtleneck worn at "the presentation of the NeXT computer." The NeXT Computer was unveiled on October 12, 1988 — one of Jobs' most important moments, the computer he built after being pushed out of Apple. The irony that a NeXT-era turtleneck ended up embedded in an Apple logo is the kind of detail that Jobs himself would have appreciated.
One factual wrinkle: footage from the actual NeXT Computer launch in 1988 shows Jobs wearing a tuxedo, not a turtleneck. The turtleneck became his signature look later during the NeXT years. So the fabric is authentic to Jobs and authentic to the NeXT era — but the specific claim about which presentation it came from gets a little fuzzy on closer examination. This doesn't diminish the collectible value for true believers, but it's worth knowing.
Jobs' black turtleneck became one of the most recognizable pieces of executive clothing in modern history. He wore it almost exclusively from the mid-1990s onwards. Designer Issey Miyake made them for him. Jobs reportedly had about 100 of the same turtleneck because he found the process of choosing what to wear in the morning a waste of decision-making energy. The turtleneck was a statement about focus — wearing the same thing every day so your mind could be free for more important decisions. That philosophy now costs ₹8 lakh to hold in your hand.
Who is Caviar and why do people buy these things?
Caviar is a Saint Petersburg-based luxury phone customization studio that has been operating for years in the space of ultra-premium collector tech. They've made gold-plated iPhones, phones with diamonds, phones with fragments of famous objects, phones with meteorite embedded in the back. Their client base is exactly who you'd expect: ultra-high-net-worth collectors, tech enthusiasts with serious disposable income, and people for whom a standard iPhone feels insufficiently exclusive.
The market for luxury tech collectibles is real and surprisingly large. Rolex sells watches for ₹5-50 lakh that tell time no better than a ₹500 Casio. Hermès sells leather goods at prices that have no relationship to the cost of manufacturing them. Caviar is doing the same thing for smartphones — selling the story, the exclusivity, and the craftsmanship at a premium that the underlying hardware doesn't justify but the collector market absolutely sustains.
Previous Caviar Jobs-themed iPhones have included versions with turtleneck fragments on the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro. Those units sold out. Caviar has a track record of completing their limited runs.
What this tells us about Apple's legacy in 2026
Apple turned 50 this year. Caviar explicitly named this line the "Apple 50th Anniversary Collection." Steve Jobs died in 2011, and nearly 15 years later his personal effects are still being embedded in consumer electronics as collectibles. That's a level of cultural legacy that very few technology figures have achieved — and none in quite the same way.
In India, Steve Jobs is genuinely revered. His Stanford commencement speech is one of the most watched motivational videos among Indian students and entrepreneurs. His biography by Walter Isaacson is required reading in management programs. Apple's rise from near-bankruptcy to the world's most valuable company is taught as a business case study. The idea of owning a physical piece of that story — even a tiny square of fabric — has a real emotional resonance for a certain category of Apple fan.
That said, this is explicitly not a product for the Indian market in any practical sense. At ₹8 lakh for the base model, it costs more than a well-specced Honda City or a good chunk of a down payment on a flat. The regular iPhone 17 Pro starts at ₹1,34,900 in India. The JOBS edition costs six times that. It's a collector's item, and collectors at this price point exist mostly outside India's current consumer base.
The two remaining units — what happens next
Caviar says two of the nine units are still available as of this writing. Given that previous limited Jobs editions sold through, these will likely sell eventually — possibly quickly once the collector community fully processes the availability. The certification of authenticity that comes with each unit is the key document that validates the fabric fragment, and Caviar's track record on these certifications is considered reliable within the luxury phone customization community.
If you're not in the market for an ₹8 lakh iPhone, the story still matters for what it says about how Apple's brand has transcended the product category entirely. The iPhone is no longer just a phone. In the Caviar JOBS edition, it's a relic — a physical connection to the person who most shaped how we think about personal technology. That's a kind of brand value that can't be manufactured. It has to be earned over decades.
TamilTech's take
Look, nobody buying this phone needs our advice on whether it's worth it. At ₹8 lakh, this is a pure collector's decision made by people for whom money is not a relevant variable in the conversation. What's genuinely interesting here is the cultural marker it represents: in 2026, 15 years after Steve Jobs' death, a piece of his clothing is still considered valuable enough to embed in a $9,630 phone and sell out. That's legacy. Whether you'd spend ₹8 lakh on it is a different question entirely — but the fact that someone will is a real statement about what Apple and Jobs mean to the tech world.
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