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.
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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.
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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.
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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.