Featured Image Credit: Apple
Man discovers the shocking trade-in value offered for a brand-new iPhone 17 Air.
Trading in your old phone for a new one can help knock some money off the upgrade price. Depending on the condition, the offer might not be great, but for a brand-new phone, you'd expect a solid return, right?
A US man decided to test this assumption by attempting to trade in a factory-fresh iPhone 17 Air. To be clear, the device wasn't previously owned or something several generations old, but a brand-new device straight from the packaging.
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After buying a new iPhone 17 Air for $1,000, YouTuber Smokin' Silicon took it to every retailer and platform that claims to buy phones, from major chain stores to online trade-in services.
Along the way, he hit GameStop, Best Buy, EcoATM kiosks, electronics resellers, pawn shops and the big online trade-in sites to get their best offers.
It turns out that hardly any of them could provide one.
At GameStop, their system couldn't even identify the model. The computer crashed when confronted with something too recent for its database.
Best Buy’s in-store system wasn’t any better, and Back Market didn't list the iPhone 17 Air at all, so they couldn't make an offer even if they wanted to.
As for EcoATM, a quick and easy robot kiosk, it took what the YouTuber said felt like '20 years' to scan the device before admitting defeat. The error message read: "Oops, your phone is too new for me to buy!" which led the YouTuber to wonder what exactly the cutoff point is for a phone being 'too new.'
Just two companies provided actual valuations, which were Gazelle and SellCell. But neither impressed the content creator.
Gazelle's offer sat at $500, slashing the purchase price in half, while SellCell’s highest quote of $714 still meant losing a huge chunk of the value.
What started as a seemingly straightforward task quickly proved anything but.
Despite being Apple's latest flagship, the iPhone 17 Air was treated like an outlier rather than a premium product. First-time buyers of new releases seemingly pay an invisible price for being at the front of the line.
Although by the video's end, Smokin' Silicon displayed a comparison chart showing where the best iPhone 17 Air prices could be found, with eBay topping the list at $950.
Viewers gathered in the comments section to react to the tech YouTuber's experiment.
"It's kind of like with cars, the moment you take em out of the dealership it loses a ton of value, but the value loss then decreases as time goes so in about 5 years it doesn't devalue that fast," one user wrote.
"You have to wait 2-3months after release to sell new phones," another claimed.
