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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

What do you do with your old iPhone?

By Megan McArdle
Jun 9 2008, 7:53 AM ET Comment

Well, today's the day that Jobs is supposed to unleash his new creation on the world--and not a moment too soon, as I seem to have lost my old cell phone. For those who are still in full possession, however, this presents a problem, at least if they are iPhone owners. The new phone will have better data speeds, probably better call quality, and several new features like GPS. This suddenly renders the price of their old phones--well, probably you can still trade it in that currency composed entirely of gigantic stones.

The word on the street from my shadowy hipster associates is that the thing to do is jailbreak the phone and then ebay it internationally to some country where the iPhone is not yet sold through a carrier. In those fabled lands, a jailbroken iPhone 1.0 is probably worth almost as much as you paid for it.

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