Apple’s Trade-In Program Just Got Worse

Apple’s trade-in program allows you to save a lot of money when it’s time to get a new iPhone every year. The values aren’t the best, but it allows you to get a new phone straight from Apple and save some money by sending the company your older one. Now, though, the company’s trade-in program just became slightly worse.

Apple has just tweaked how much it offers for trade-ins towards a new iPhone 16. It’s largely bad news, though, as Apple has just applied an across-the-board value decrease for a lot of its smartphones. Granted, the decreases range from $5 to $50, so they’re not huge decreases. Apple is now offering $630 for the iPhone 15 Pro Max rather than the previous $650 it offered. The iPhone 14 Pro Max got hit with a larger slash, from $500 to $450. The full trade-in value comparison is below, courtesy of MacRumors.

We have a few takeaways here. For one, the price cuts affect mostly the newer models—the iPhone 13, the iPhone 14, and the iPhone 15 series. We do have price cuts on the older ones, but not in all of them, and those where we do have price cuts, they are not really that significant, ranging from $5 to $10 less. The only exception to this is the iPhone 12 mini, which got slashed from $150 to $120—this actually represents a 20% decrease, so it’s a pretty big slash compared to some of the others. Meanwhile, the trade-in value for the iPhone XS actually increased from $80 to $90, and Apple stopped giving anything for the iPhone 7 Plus, released in 2016. It was just $40, but it’s an ancient phone, so at least you were getting something back.

As far as other hardware goes, Apple increased what it offers for some Apple Watch trade-ins—it will give you $390 for an Apple Watch Ultra 2 and up to $145 for an Apple Watch Series 8. It also increased its MacBook Pro trade-in value to up to $915. The trade-in values for Android phones are mostly unchanged, but Apple has never offered good value for these. Remember that all these prices are maximum values, and if your device is in non-optimal condition or has damage, this price might go down. You can check out all the prices here.

As we said before, Apple’s trade-in prices have never been the best, but the fact that the company is moving to be less competitive is certainly a bummer. If you want to maximize what you can get from your old phone, you can either check trade-in programs by carriers (which are usually much more generous and sometimes even give you free phones if you check them out on a good day) or sell your phone on the second-hand market.

Source: MacRumors