Things that cost the same as coffee with Tim Cook - and are way more fun

A coffee date with Tim Cook has sold for the whopping price of $610,000 to an anonymous bidder.

The spendthrift Apple fan will get half an hour with the fruity firm's CEO, during which tête-à-tête he or she will no doubt want to ask Mr Cook why Cupertino charges 65 quid for a Macbook power charger or perhaps explore the Cupertinian liking for offshore tax schemes.

The proceeds from the CharityBuzz auction went towards The RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.

So what else could you have bought?

About 248,980 extra cups of coffee without Cook, according to the average price given in these stats. This works out to about three cups a day for 227 years.

You could also buy a Ferrari Enzo and have some change left over from the $500,000 bill.

For a small extra payment, you could also buy a small archipelago in the middle of Saimaa Lake in Finland. One of the islands boasts a sauna, so visitors can perform the time-honoured Fenno-Scandinavian tradition of getting naked, beating each with leafy branches and then diving into freezing water.

You could buy an ultra-limited edition Nissan Juke as well. Just 25 or so are being made and they are likely to be snapped up by minted Middle Easterners, who like to go and race around the deserts in flash cars.

The free-spending fanboi may have also preferred to hire a small army of around 60 au pairs for a year. The same $610,000 again could arm a sizeable revolutionary movement with 1,142 AK-47s. Should one require a less subtle weapon, you could buy nine of these Soviet SU-100 tanks, which were produced just after World War II.

Or some combination of the last three options might be in order. The average au pair could surely be taught to handle an AK without much difficulty, but there might be a few mishaps with the tanks.

And you'd rather have coffee with Tim Cook? Pah. ®